A former branch manager and senior vice president who rose in the ranks over a dozen years at Wells Fargo now accuses the bank of harassment, retaliation and wrongful termination, alleging a new boss favored a “boys club” and “made clear that if you were not openly MAGA Right Wing QAnon, you would not be accepted in their club.”
The supervisor “also fostered an atmosphere of casualness, inappropriate behavior, and lack of work ethic. He would take the male employees during the day to Hydration Rooms, Vitamin IVs, and Cryotherapy,” Maureen O’Donnell, now an executive at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, alleges in a lawsuit filed last week in California Superior Court in Los Angeles.
O’Donnell additionally accuses Wells Fargo of failure to prevent harassment, discrimination and retaliation, failure to pay wages due at termination and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The conduct by Wells Fargo, the supervisor and 10 unidentified defendants was “extreme and outrageous and beyond the bounds of all decency and … outside the course and scope of the normal employment relationship,” she alleges.
“Defendants acted with the intent to denigrate, degrade, discriminate, harass and retaliate against plaintiff,” the complaint states.
A Wells Fargo spokesperson told ThinkAdvisor by email on Friday, “We are reviewing the complaint and have no further comment at this time.”
O’Donnell started working for Wells Fargo in July 2010 as a regional banking director in Los Angeles and Orange County, created many “enormously successful” programs and received praise from the company, according to the complaint.
In 2013 she was selected for a branch manager leadership program and was made an associate manager in the Valley market; she “continued to be extremely successful and well-liked by local and national leadership as well as the more than 200 financial advisors and support staff with whom she worked,” and earned the leadership program’s maximum allowable bonus that year, it says.
The next year, she was named branch manager at Downtown Liberty Plaza in New York, and in 2015 was promoted to branch manager at a Park Avenue location, “one of the most prestigious and highest revenue-generating Wells Fargo Advisors Wealth Management office(s),” according to the complaint.
O’Donnell later was named a Wells Fargo Advisors “premier manager” and, ready to return to California in 2017, was chosen as branch manager for the Irvine office’s private client group, it says. Two months later, the executive who tapped her for that role moved to a new position and defendant David Kistner replaced him as the private client group’s market leader for L.A. and Orange County, the suit says.
After becoming O’Donnell’s boss, Kistner immediately started treating her differently than he previously had in social work settings the few times they’d met, she alleges.
“Kistner clearly preferred the ‘boys club’ of male managers. Indeed, he had never had a female manager report to him before (O’Donnell). And (she) was the only female manager (out of six total managers) within the market,” the complaint alleges.
“Despite plaintiff's proven success, Kistner treated plaintiff differently than her male peers. He regarded her as an assistant and his market admin. He dismissed her ideas and opinions but immediately accepted the same ideas and opinions from the men,” it contends.
Kistner and male employees, meanwhile, “regularly went out drinking in Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach, and used (Wells Fargo’s) private suite at Sofi Stadium to entertain not their clients — for whom it was exclusively reserved — but themselves, their spouses, their girlfriends and friends,” the complaint alleges.
O’Donnell also alleges Kistner withheld wealth management financial advisor recruiting leads from her and instead gave them to her male peers.
