A woman has dropped her lawsuit alleging she was wrongfully fired from her job as an embryologist at a Beverly Hills fertility center in 2022 for complaining about sexual harassment and alleged unlawful activity, including the implantation of nonviable embryos.
Plaintiff Desiree Garcia-Solano also contended in her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit against ART Reproductive Center LLC that the chief scientific officer sent her a cake in celebration of her decision to have breast augmentation.
On Monday, Garcia-Solano’s attorneys filed court papers with Judge Armen Tamzarian asking that the plaintiff’s case be dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be refiled.
The court papers did not state if a settlement was reached or if Garcia-Solano is not pursuing the case for other reasons. However, during a Nov. 29 case management conference the attorneys told the judge they were going to engage in mediation.
In their earlier court papers, the fertility center’s lawyers denied Garcia-Solano’s allegations.
The suit states that Garcia-Solano was hired in January 2017 as a laboratory assistant at $19 an hour and the next year was promoted to junior embryologist with an annual pay of $123,000.
Shortly after starting at ART, the plaintiff was often harassed sexually, including by employees who played a game of poking her in the posterior, the suit stated.
When a male co-worker made lewd comments to Garcia-Solano, managers who overheard him laughed at his remarks, the suit stated.
After Garcia-Solano underwent breast augmentation surgery, the center’s chief scientific officer gave her a cake with a sarcastic message celebrating her decision, and all the lab employees mocked her with a silly version of the Happy Birthday song, substituting another word for “birthday,” according to the suit.
Garcia-Solano also was denied training and promotional opportunities in favor of less qualified male employees and was often singled out for unwarranted criticisms by management, according to the suit. It further states that the chief scientific officer dismissed her concerns and told her it was against company policy to talk about the pay rates of other employees.
In April 2020, Garcia-Solano emailed the chief scientific officer and the lab team leader a list of patients’ missing embryo and sperm specimens with a proposed system for updating ART files with the correct storage location, but the officer declined to respond and ART’s storage remained in disarray, the plaintiff alleged.
Garcia-Solano received the same response when in December 2021 she proposed a process to legally and sensitively manage cryo bank discards to ensure that only viable embryos would be implanted in patients, the suit stated.
Two months later she discovered that one of the embryos that she was about to implant in a patient was not viable and she reported the issue to management, but managers told her to continue with the procedure regardless of the embryo’s viability, according to the suit filed last June 6.
Garcia-Solano was fired in June 2022 on which she maintains was a pretextual allegation that she had violated a patient’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rights.