The Non-Financial Ledger

Stacie Culp started at Remington in June 2017. So did Stephanie Peters. Neither of them knew yet what kind of workplace they’d walked into. Both were servers. Both were women. Both were about to find out what happens when you work somewhere that has already decided, before a single complaint is filed, that harassment is mostly a management inconvenience.

The harassment from Jason DeSalvo didn’t happen once. It wasn’t a misread moment. It was a pattern, documented by multiple coworkers who described it when investigators finally got around to asking. He spoke about other servers’ bodies. He made overtly sexual comments to minors at work, comments severe enough that those young employees were visibly and noticeably uncomfortable. He allegedly touched women without their consent. He asked female employees to come to his house. And he did all of this while holding a position of partial authority over the staff — assistant floor manager — which made every interaction with him carry an undercurrent of power that workers had no clean way to refuse.

Neither Culp nor Peters reported him right away. That’s not a character flaw. That’s what happens when workers already know, from watching how management treats other people’s complaints, that nothing will change and that they may be the ones who pay a price for speaking up. Peters had already told Culp directly: Remington management had a history of dismissing harassment and bullying. The message had been sent before either woman opened her mouth.

Ms. Culp’s complaint didn’t even get to management through proper channels. She applied for her old job at Applebee’s to escape the situation. When an Applebee’s manager asked why she was leaving Remington, she mentioned the harassment. That conversation made its way back to Remington. Management called her in during her shift. Not to a private office first. During her shift. She jotted a statement on a piece of paper. That was the foundation of Remington’s investigation.

What followed was a performance of accountability rather than the real thing. The general manager conducted interviews but asked only two questions, with no follow-up. When Stephanie Peters told investigators that DeSalvo had been sexually explicit with underage girls at work, that information went nowhere. The general manager began to believe, while the investigation was still technically ongoing, that most of what Culp had said was false. DeSalvo got five days off without pay and came back to work.

He came back to the same shifts as the women who had reported him. Peters was put on shift with him. He allegedly refused her drink orders, cursed at her, and shoved her. She went to the general manager’s office. His response — recorded in court documents and quoted verbatim — was “Gosh, Steph, do we have to do this every week?” She left immediately and did not return. She lost her job. DeSalvo kept his.

Culp’s hours were reduced after she reported. She resigned. The company she reported to kept running. The man she reported kept working. The federal courts later ruled that scheduling her back on shift with her harasser was not a “materially adverse” employment action because DeSalvo worked so many shifts there was no way to avoid overlap. The logic being: if a harasser is present enough, his presence becomes normalized and ceasing to fight it becomes the worker’s problem to solve.

What was lost here cannot be measured in back pay. Two women lost jobs they needed. They lost the ability to trust the legal mechanisms designed to protect them. They endured a years-long court process — from 2018 to 2025 — only to have a jury’s confused verdict thrown out in a way that denied them the money that same jury apparently decided they deserved. The system did not fail them through indifference. It failed them through a series of deliberate choices — by management, by lawyers, by judges — each of which, individually, could be explained away, and collectively, adds up to exactly nothing for Stacie Culp and Stephanie Peters.

Legal Receipts

Every quote below is pulled verbatim from the U.S. Court of Appeals opinion, Case No. 24-1022, filed March 31, 2025. These are the moments where the record speaks for itself.

“Is there anything inappropriate around Jason DeSalvo that you would like to disclose or talk about[?]”; and “Is there anything you would like to add?”

• These were the only two questions Remington’s general manager asked every interviewee in a sexual harassment investigation. He asked no follow-up questions, even when employees directly described harassment. The framing — “anything you would like to disclose” — put the burden entirely on the workers to volunteer information, rather than on the investigator to actually investigate.
• The court record confirms that interviewees were not specifically asked whether they witnessed inappropriate interactions between Culp and DeSalvo — the person whose complaint had triggered the investigation in the first place.

One interviewee stated that Mr. DeSalvo “speaks about other servers’ asses” and had caused a female employee to quit. Another interviewee admitted that she had “[h]eard of him touching others” inappropriately. Ms. Peters said that Mr. DeSalvo had asked her and another employee for drinks at his house, that she had witnessed him sexually harassing others, and that he had been “overtly sexual verbally with underage girls, and they were visibly very uncomfortable.”

• This is what the investigation found — and then did nothing with. Multiple employees corroborated a pattern of behavior. One reported touching. One reported behavior serious enough to make a coworker quit. Ms. Peters reported DeSalvo making sexual comments to minors who were visibly distressed.
• Despite all of this, no follow-up interviews were conducted. The general manager declined to re-interview even Ms. Culp, the original complainant. The outcome was a five-day suspension — less than a week off — and a demotion that kept DeSalvo employed in the same restaurant.

Mr. Feely began to think that “a lot of the comments from [Ms. Culp] were false.”

• The general manager conducting the investigation formed a belief that the complainant was lying — while the investigation was still ongoing, and before any follow-up interviews had been completed. This is the definition of a predetermined conclusion.
• This belief did not stop him from suspending DeSalvo, which is its own contradiction: Remington apparently found enough to punish DeSalvo while simultaneously deciding the woman who reported him was probably lying.

“Gosh, Steph, do we have to do this every week?”

• This was the general manager’s documented response when Stephanie Peters came to his office to report that she had been put back on shift with the man who had harassed her — and who had just shoved her. This is not paraphrased. It is the verbatim quote recorded in court filings.
• Ms. Peters left the restaurant immediately after this exchange and never returned. The court later ruled this response was not a materially adverse employment action — meaning it was legally insufficient, by itself, to constitute retaliation under Title VII.

“During this period of time, there [could not] be any valid documented complaints from fellow employees or customers.”

• This is the language from DeSalvo’s 30-day probation notice. The standard is not that he must stop the behavior. The standard is that complaints must be “valid” and “documented.” This framing rewards a harasser for keeping victims too intimidated to file formal complaints, and for ensuring that any misconduct during the probation period goes undocumented.
• The two women he had just been accused of harassing were still working in the same restaurant while this probation was active.

“We cannot enter judgment without choosing between the conflicting findings of fact and thereby overturning one of them” — the jury’s verdict is not reconcilable. The jury’s finding of liability for punitive damages in Question 5 simply cannot logically coexist with its finding of no Title VII violation in Questions 1 and 3.

• This is the Tenth Circuit describing why the district court’s attempt to simply discard the $125,000 punitive damages award — while keeping the verdict that denied Culp any other compensation — was legally impermissible. The jury’s answers destroyed each other, and no court has the authority to pick which one to keep.
• The result is a retrial. Culp will have to prove her case again in front of a new jury, years after the original events, with the same underlying facts that already confused one jury enough to produce a logically impossible verdict.

Societal Impact Mapping

This case is one data point in a documented pattern of how low-wage service industry workers — overwhelmingly women — are systematically denied protection when they report workplace sexual harassment.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now?

Remington of Montrose Golf Club is a small operation in western Colorado, not a Fortune 500 corporation — and that is exactly why this case matters. What happened here is the template for what happens in thousands of small workplaces every year where there is no HR department with any independence from the people being investigated.

Key Decision-Makers Named in the Record

• Bobby (Lew) Thompson — Majority owner of Remington of Montrose Golf Club, LLC. Named in the court record as having participated in the decision to suspend rather than terminate DeSalvo.
• Eric Feely — General Manager and lead investigator. The person who asked only two scripted questions, refused follow-up interviews against his own attorney’s advice, concluded the complainant was probably lying, and told Peters “do we have to do this every week” when she came to report physical shunting by her harasser.
• Beth Feely — Human Resources and Marketing Director. Participated in the original investigation alongside her husband, Eric Feely — a structural conflict of interest embedded in the company’s HR function.
• Rick Crippen — Food and Beverage Manager. Present at the initial meeting with Culp when her complaint surfaced.

Regulatory Watchlist

• EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission): The federal agency responsible for enforcing Title VII. Workers who experience sexual harassment or retaliation can file a charge with the EEOC before filing a lawsuit. The EEOC can investigate, attempt mediation, and, in some cases, litigate on behalf of workers.
• Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD): The state agency that enforces the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), the state law also at issue in this case. Workers can file complaints here as an alternative or supplement to the federal process.
• U.S. Department of Labor — Wage and Hour Division: If retaliation includes hour reductions or manipulation of tipped-worker pay, federal wage law may provide additional avenues for complaint.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): Workplace violence — including the shoving Ms. Peters alleges DeSalvo committed — may fall within OSHA’s general duty clause, which requires employers to maintain a workplace free from recognized hazards.

What You Can Actually Do

• If you work in a restaurant or small service business: Document everything. Text messages, shift schedules, who you talked to and when. Management will not document it for you, and courts will want a paper trail you created yourself, not one that passed through the hands of the people who dismissed you.
• Contact the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United): A national worker center organization specifically focused on the restaurant industry. They provide legal referrals, know-your-rights training, and direct advocacy for hospitality workers facing exactly these situations.
• Find your local workers’ center: The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and similar organizations maintain directories of local worker centers that provide free legal support and collective advocacy, particularly for workers in industries with high rates of unreported harassment.
• Support co-workers who report: The most effective documented deterrent to retaliation is collective solidarity. Harassers — and the managers who protect them — rely on isolation. If a coworker reports, show up for them in the ways that are safe for you to do.
• Share this case in your industry communities: The legal outcome here — that putting a harasser back on shift with his victims is not “materially adverse” — is the law in the Tenth Circuit right now. Workers in Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and New Mexico need to know this, because it tells them exactly how little protection the current interpretation of Title VII provides in scheduling decisions.