Legal Question in Personal Injury in Virginia

Hello--good grief, how miserable. What a petty, infantile series of displays this sounds like. Bravo to you for being bigger than this behavior. But yes, you have claims, and no, you don't need to make them with your fists to get relief. Nor should you, for the reasons you suspect--violence by you gets you in civil or even criminal trouble, and self-defense claims can be hard to prove--you have to have had a reasonable fear of imminent severe bodily harm, not just a course of abusive actions by the co-worker. But I think the dealership would bear legal responsibility if they kept him and he carried out any of his threats of violence against you.

Next, even if both of you are contractors and not employees, it seems to me the dealership should have fired this guy by now, and may be liable for not doing so under various tort or contract theories on the evidence we already have. I would keep logging and reporting every threat or other instance of mistreatment, then keeping track of your reports and meetings. I would also raise the buzz-phrase "hostile working environment," a term borrowed from civil rights law. I see nothing in your description to indicate racial or other unlawful discrimination--allowing co-worker maltreatment based on illicit criteria like race, national origin or religion can get the employer in civil rights trouble--but common-law tort and contract claims are available regardless. In civil rights law there's such a thing as a hostile working environment, and this sounds like it even though not based on an illicit discriminatory criterion. We'd argue by analogy that it's a tort by the dealership, or a breach of its contract with you, to create, foster or fail to relieve an oppressive working environment that would be intolerable to any reasonable person. You shouldn't have to quit to assert the claim, but if you did quit we would have a constructive discharge claim based on the environment's intolerability, so you can tell them that.

Or you can get a lawyer to write a well-constructed letter with this stuff in it. That ought to spur them to fire the guy. You'd have to think about whether he's a stalker, but in no event would I advise taking physical action against him. That'll only make you the issue, which is the last thing we want. You can ask them one more time, making a written note of the request, saying your next step will be to contact legal counsel.

I hope this gives you a sense you have recourse. I regularly write elegant nastygrams like the one I'm suggesting, and I would gladly do it for you for not a lot. I'm an experienced civil rights plaintiffs' lawyer licensed in Va., D.C. and Md. Feel free to write me at [email protected]. Good luck whatever you decide. --Steve Pershing.