Carpenter claims foreman at NYC’s richest condo forced her into threesomes
By Doree Lewak and Kathianne Boniello
A lesbian carpenter-apprentice working at 220 Central Park South, where a penthouse sold for a record $238 million, says she was forced to have sex with her male boss inside the building’s unfinished apartments and bathrooms every week for two years.
Foreman Elvis Philbert even demanded Denise Mignott’s bring her future wife to a hotel for a threesome, Mignott claimed to The Post.
Terrified to lose a good union job, Mignott gave in, she charged in her Manhattan Supreme Court action against Philbert and Woodworks Construction.
“Any time he feels like it, he would demand sex,” Mignott told The Post. “I know I had to do it or he’d fire me.”
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Mignott, 34, claims she was raped multiple times in her native Jamaica, where “being a lesbian is like a curse,” she said.
She said she began learning her trade in the traditionally male industry in her homeland, and soon learned “it’s really rough. Guys come at you every day.”
But nothing could prepare her for Philbert, who alleged forced her into sex every week for two years.
“You have to sleep with me, or I will lay you off,” Philbert allegedly told Mignott. “Do you want the job or not?”
Mignott said in a tearful interview, “I know I had to do it. I didn’t know what he was capable of. He was the foreman and he had the power.”
The boss even wanted to get her pregnant, an emotional Mignott alleged.
“It was my worst fear. Who would want to get pregnant by a demon?”
In January 2019, Philbert demanded Mignott get her then-girlfriend Tasheka, for a threesome in a Queens hotel.
“I told her, ‘If we don’t do it, how are we going to survive?’” said Mignott, who was in Carpenters Local 926 and supported the out-of-work Tasheka on her pay, which rose from $19 an hour initially to $42 an hour in 2019.
Tasheka Mignott, who married Denise six months later, said the encounter with Philbert left the couple, who have no kids, “depressed and terrified.”
The threesome was not mentioned in Mignott’s lawsuit in the interest of “brevity,” according to Denise Mignott’s lawyer, Randy Kleinman of Gerstman Schwartz, who added that he did not include “every coerced sexual encounter” in the legal filing.
“It was the hardest thing for me to do. It’s like we’re doing it to save our life, financially. I sat in the car for almost an hour crying before I went in,” Tasheka told The Post.
“He asked me for my wife and I had to let him have my wife,” said Mignott, who is seeking unspecified damages.
Philbert denied the allegations. Woodworks did a “full investigation” of Mignott’s claims, finding them “baseless and without merit,” the company said.
Kleinman said the industry needs “procedural safeguards in place to protect their employees.”
