The partner of an allegedly sex-addicted businessman who sacked her as his company secretary after she confronted him about using a gay dating app and an escort website while on a family holiday has been awarded nearly €100,000 by an employment tribunal.
The bulk of the sum, €93,362 was awarded by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) for the woman’s losses from dismissal after she gave evidence that the businessman cut off her pay and had her company car towed after he left the family home in 2023.
She had told her partner she didn’t want to be involved with a programme of “treatment for sex and other addiction” he had proposed and that she planned to separate from him, the tribunal heard.
Complaints by the woman under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994, and the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 were upheld by the tribunal in an anonymised decision published on Wednesday morning by the WRC.
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At a hearing in Dublin last winter, the woman told the tribunal she and the businessman were engaged to be married at the time he was establishing the business and that he had fathered her second child.
Her evidence was that after the businessman encouraged her to give up her job to “work for him”, she took up a €48,000-a-year position as company secretary, working mainly from home.
In the summer of 2023, while away on a family holiday, the woman said, she discovered that her partner “had downloaded the dating [or] casual sex app, Grindr”.
This was “specifically oriented for [the] LGBTQ+ community”, and it was “clear” to her that her partner was “engaged in prolific homosexual encounters [or] liaisons”, she told the WRC.
She also referred to seeing a message from a website called Escort Ireland on the businessman‘s phone during the holiday.
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Confronted about the matter, her partner’s position was that he “planned to undergo treatment for sex and other addiction” and wanted the complainant “to be involved in that programme”, the complainant told the tribunal. She told him she did not want to participate, she said.
After that, the businessman “terminated [her] employment, ended their relationship and moved out”, she wrote in her complaint form.
Adjudicator Patricia Owens wrote that she was satisfied the arrangements for a hearing in late 2024 into the case were “properly communicated” to the businessman, but noted he neither attended nor gave the WRC “any response to the complaints”.
She upheld the unfair dismissal claim in the absence of any evidence contradicting the complainant’s position that she was “summarily dismissed”, awarding €63,362 for loss of earnings and a further €30,000 for losing access to a company car
Ms Owens also awarded €3,712, three weeks’ salary, as compensation for the non-provision of a contract of employment and €2,000 under the working time legislation. The total sum awarded in the case was €99,074.
The decision was anonymised to shield the identities of the woman’s children and in light of separate legal proceedings, the adjudicator said.
The complainant’s evidence had been that her pay was stopped in the winter of 2023, leaving her with no income and building up “a lot of debt” while unemployed. Family commitments had meant she could only find part-time work, she said.
While she was waiting for social welfare payments to be approved, she had to rely on the support of Women’s Aid and St Vincent de Paul to provide for the “basic needs” of herself and her children, she told the WRC.
At one stage she resorted to selling household items to pay her bills, she said.
She also described waking up one morning in late 2023 to discover that her company car had been towed away overnight, leaving her “panicking” about getting her children to school. Her mother, a retiree, drew on savings to pay for a replacement, she said.
