Robb Wochnick

[October 13th, 2004] Here at Rogue Central, we spend hours purging junk emails with titles like "Hot Teen on Teen Action at the Pentagon!" We damn the perpetrators with vile curses. If we ever found out our boss was planting cyberfilth on our computer--well, our vengeance would know no bounds.

Yet this is precisely the situation one woman, whom we'll call Sara, found herself in when she signed on to work for the roguish Robb Wochnick.

According to a recent report by Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries, Wochnick hired Sara in January 2000 as the office manager of his Wilsonville business, Sports Warehouse, which sells sports memorabilia through eBay.

Working all day on her computer, Sara got used to deleting the deluge of pornographic spam she was getting in her email.

But she soon noticed a new phenomenon. When she arrived at work some days, a full-screen image of naked men and women having sex would greet her--something that made her feel "instant disgust." She also had to endure Wochnick's obscene jokes and unwanted back rubs, which he wouldn't stop even when asked. On one occasion, after she'd left a bag of clothes behind, she found that it had been rifled through, and her "small lacy teddy" was in the office washing machine.

On May 4, 2001, the situation reached a...um, climax. When Sara arrived at work, she not only found a porn website open on her computer, but also noticed a substance on her desk she suspected was semen and a "used tea towel" on the floor. Disgusted, she locked her computer with a password. Wochnick flipped, and he refused to promise to stop accessing naughty sites. Sara had to quit, and filed a complaint.

On Aug. 31, 2004, labor commissioner Dan Gardner found in her favor, saying that Wochnick "repeatedly and intentionally left [Sara's] computer screen so that [she] was unavoidably exposed to pornography against her will." Gardner ordered Wochnick to pay $1,200 in back wages and $40,000 in penalties.

Wochnick plans to appeal the ruling and claims BOLI, which deemed his testimony "internally inconsistent, self-serving, and...generally unbelievable," blocked the truth in the case.

"What we have is a case of the bleeding-heart liberals in Oregon running a kangaroo court through BOLI and not letting acceptable evidence go through," he says. "You tell me how to resolve spam, and I'll do it."