Q: False sexual harrasment accusation
Someone I work with is accusing me of sexual harassment. We are both girls, I'm a feminine lesbian. So we got one another numbers from work. I messaged her telling her " Your underpants are showing, just looking out for you." she sends an emoji. I said " nice underwear " and send a laughing emoji. She replied with a laughing GIF and said " Maybe that's why Mr.L spoke to me today. " The problem is I deleted the text messages, it was my birthday month on April and I didn't want anyone negative on my cell. The conversation happened in March, we are now in May. She also deleted her response, this has been brought to HR and I look bad. I let her know I'm not interested, I even told her work was uncomfortable, etc. She brought it up to human resources until now because she got caught putting a students sweater onto their chest. On the text messages, she never said she was uncomfortable. This girl does give me vibes of being a homophobic person. (It was a one-time thing) Please help me out
A: I'm sorry to hear about your situation. There may not be much you can do from a legal standpoint unfortunately. If you work for a private company, you are most likely an at will employee, which means that you can be terminated at any time, with or without a reason, so if the company decides to fire you for this, there's probably no recourse. You could potentially have a claim against the person accusing you, but you would need to show the accusations were false, and it does not sound like that is the case since there were some inappropriate text messages exchanged.
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