Defense argues credibility in winery case

Lawyers for Dick Niner question co-workers about plaintiff’s job performance and work habits

tool goes here Defense attorneys continued Friday their attempt to poke holes in the credibility of a woman who is suing a North County winery owner for sexual harassment.

Tammi Herron, a part-time hand model and 44-year-old single mother of two, is suing Dick Niner, a 69-year-old Paso Robles winery owner and venture capitalist, for making unwanted sexual advances toward her when she was his sales representative for Niner Wine Estates in 2007.

Besides the sexual harassment claim, Herron is alleging that Niner Wine Estates created such intolerable or aggravated work conditions that a reasonable person would have been compelled to resign.

Niner denies the charges, and has testified that Herron’s allegations are “fiction.”

“This is a classic he-said, she-said case,” said one of his defense attorneys, Martin Moroski, in his opening remarks before the jury a little more than a week ago. “At the core is credibility ... and the stories she is telling are not credible.”

In cross-examining Herron on Friday, the other defense attorney, Mark Connely, sought to point out discrepancies in some things Herron said had happened and what they allege actually occurred.

For instance, in one of her depositions, she had said the company’s general manager at the time, Mike Musso, was making her work while a doctor had ordered her to bed-rest. Connely argued that Musso had made the work request a day before she had presented him with the medical orders.

Also, while she had allegedly written in some work logs that she visited certain accounts in Southern California on one particular day, Moroski said it was impossible for her to have done so because her phone logs showed she was either in Atascadero or Templeton during that time.

Herron’s attorney Brian Osborne rebutted that point, saying that the work logs were really projections of what she hoped to do in the coming week.

Osborne also sought to show the jury that while Herron made a number of phone calls to Niner after the alleged incident, it was because she was trying to decide on how to proceed.

“In the meantime, she had to do her job,” Osborne said. “She needed the job to pay her rent and feed her children.”

Two employees of Niner Wine Estates, Sue Underwood and Allison Dana-Addison, also testified that Herron never complained to them that Niner had acted inappropriately.

Underwood, however, said she was not close to Herron and did not know who else Herron should have gone to about the matter.

Both women were also present at a conference call between them, Herron and Musso, where they discussed the loss of their distributor and the necessity of Herron to undertake both sales and distribution work until they found another distributor, they said.

Under cross-examination, Underwood, who was the company’s accountant at the time, also said she found nothing inappropriate in Herron’s listing of travel expenses and that the company had no written employee policies at the time. Nor were any employee policies posted in the workplace, as required by state law, including those regarding sexual harassment, she said.

“It was a loose operation,” Underwood said.

Both employees recollected Niner’s wife, Pam, complaining of Herron’s visit to the couple’s home in Wyoming.

Niner had invited Herron and her children to visit and told her there would be no problems. Pam Niner called Herron the “house guest from hell,” but Herron testified she simply tried to be unobtrusive.

Dana-Addison also testified she had received positive e-mails about Herron’s job performance from the company’s clients, including one that said “Tammi is fantastic.”

She was also present when the company’s wine maker, Amanda Cramer, called Herron’s travel schedule “excessive,” she said, although she pointed out that Herron was on the road a lot because “that was her job.”

Herron is seeking an unspecified sum of money for damages, reimbursement of attorney’s fees and costs, as well as any further relief that the court deems just and proper, according to court records.

Closing arguments are set for Monday.