Reported / Citable
Background
Trevor Decloedt worked as a patient service representative at RadNet Management, an imaging services company in Los Angeles. Starting in early 2022, a coworker named Ceballos subjected him to a sustained campaign of harassment targeting his sexual orientation — repeatedly telling him being gay was a sin, threatening to kill him, pulling his hair, and at one point attacking him with enough force that he fled to the bathroom for safety. Despite multiple reports to supervisors, the company took no corrective action. Decloedt eventually told HR the harassment had driven him to contemplate suicide; RadNet fired him in February 2023.
Decloedt sued RadNet and several individual managers for eleven causes of action under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA — the state’s main anti-discrimination statute), including sexual harassment, hostile work environment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. RadNet moved to compel arbitration under an agreement Decloedt had signed at hire, invoking the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), which generally requires courts to enforce such agreements.
The trial court denied arbitration, finding the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 (EFAA) — a federal statute that allows plaintiffs alleging sexual harassment to opt out of mandatory arbitration — applied to Decloedt’s case because he had alleged a FEHA sexual harassment claim. RadNet appealed, arguing that harassment based on sexual orientation is not “sexual harassment” within the EFAA’s meaning, and that even if it were, Decloedt had not pleaded enough facts to state a viable claim.
The Court’s Holding
The Second District Court of Appeal (Division One) affirmed. The court held that harassment based on sexual orientation is a form of sexual harassment under FEHA, and that Decloedt’s allegations were sufficient to state such a claim — which is all the EFAA requires to strip mandatory arbitration of an entire case.
On the statutory question, the court relied on Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that discrimination against an employee “because of” sex under Title VII necessarily encompasses discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status. Because FEHA’s harassment prohibition uses the same “because of sex” language as Title VII, and California courts regularly look to federal precedent when interpreting analogous FEHA provisions, the same logic applies: an employer who harasses an employee because of homosexuality is harassing that employee because of sex. The court also noted that a 2025 case from the Fifth District, Quilala v. Securitas, had already reached the same conclusion on materially similar facts.
On the pleading question, the court found Decloedt’s allegations — continual anti-gay comments over many months, repeated threats, physical assaults, and a supervisor’s inaction — were more than enough to plausibly allege severe or pervasive harassment under a Rule 12(b)(6) standard. The fact that some individual incidents were framed around client work did not sever them from the anti-gay animus that motivated Ceballos’s behavior overall. Because Decloedt alleged at least one viable FEHA sexual harassment claim, the EFAA applies and exempts his entire case from arbitration.
Key Takeaways
- Harassment targeting an employee because of sexual orientation is now expressly held to be “sexual harassment” under FEHA by the Second District — bringing California employment law in line with post-Bostock federal doctrine.
- Once a plaintiff alleges any sexual harassment claim covered by the EFAA, the entire lawsuit — including unrelated employment claims — is exempt from mandatory arbitration, even under a pre-dispute FAA arbitration agreement.
- The pleading bar for triggering the EFAA exemption is not high: a plaintiff need only plausibly allege facts constituting a sexual harassment claim; the court does not require proof at the arbitration-motion stage.
- Employers relying on broad arbitration agreements to funnel harassment claims out of court face a significant gap where any FEHA sexual harassment allegation — including one based on sexual orientation — voids the arbitration clause for the whole case.
- Defense counsel should scrutinize whether complaints pair sexual orientation harassment allegations with other FEHA claims, because the EFAA’s “relating to” language sweeps in all co-pleaded claims once the sexual harassment nexus is established.
Why It Matters
This decision matters for every California employer that uses pre-dispute arbitration agreements — which covers much of the private workforce. By confirming that FEHA sexual orientation harassment triggers the federal EFAA, the court closes an argument employers had hoped to exploit: that anti-gay harassment was a “different kind” of FEHA claim that did not qualify as sexual harassment under federal law. That argument is now foreclosed in the Second District. Combined with the EFAA’s case-wide exemption rule (settled in Liu v. Miniso Depot), a single surviving sexual harassment allegation can pull all co-pleaded claims — wage theft, retaliation, wrongful termination — into court alongside it.
For plaintiffs’ employment lawyers, this significantly expands the universe of cases in which arbitration agreements can be avoided. For HR and in-house counsel, it reinforces the need for prompt, documented responses to any complaint of sexual orientation harassment, since an employer’s failure to act not only creates underlying FEHA liability but also undermines the ability to force individual disputes into arbitration one at a time.