Iowa health care company accused of sexual harassment and retaliation

An Iowa company that helps state and federal agencies with taxpayer-financed health care improvement programs is being sued for alleged sexual harassment.

Telligen Inc., of West Des Moines, which is under contract with the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to help 14 states pursue various health care initiatives, is being sued by Trisha Boughn of Linn County. In part, the lawsuit alleges negligence in the hiring and supervision of Ricardo Berman, the company’s former state health solutions director.

“Berman harassed Trisha and other women on the team by asking them about their personal lives, showing them a seminude photo of his neighbor, suggesting they work in the nude, complaining about how American women cry about ‘rape’ and how this is a problem he had experienced personally,” the lawsuit states. “Telligen either failed to notice or simply didn’t care.”

“We are aware of the situation but cannot comment on ongoing or pending litigation,” said Matt Meyer, a Telligen spokesman.

According to the lawsuit, Telligen hired Boughn in October 2018, and she is currently a program specialist for the company, reviewing patient records and making assessments of nursing homes.

In May 2024, according to the lawsuit, Telligen hired Ricardo Berman, giving him supervisory responsibilities over Boughn and seven other female employees, while he worked remotely from Washington, D.C.

Berman, the lawsuit claims, told Boughn he intended to make her a “bad ass” manager to the extent that she wouldn’t recognize herself in six months, after which his conduct “quickly escalated to inappropriate and unwelcome behavior.”

According to the lawsuit, Berman began referring to Boughn and program specialist Amanda Hope as his “angels” and as “Charlie’s Angels.”

Berman, the lawsuit claims, “insisted on holding repeated, unnecessary one-on-one meetings with Trisha, demanded constant reports about who she was speaking to and the substance of those conversations, and incessantly called her during work hours, disrupting her ability to perform her job duties.”

During those conversations, Berman allegedly steered the discussion toward matters unrelated to work and which were “almost always sexual in nature.” At the same time, the lawsuit claims, Berman knew little about the company and showed “consistent indifference towards understanding Telligen’s work.”

At the end of July 2024, Berman set up a meeting for Boughn, Hope and himself to meet in person and discuss their work during a September 2024 weekend get-together in Des Moines.

In the weeks leading up to that meeting, the lawsuit alleges, Berman frequently made unsolicited comments to Boughn about co-workers being interested in him or wanting to date him, and during one work meeting remarked, “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who work naked.”

According to the lawsuit, in August 2024, Berman told Boughn and other team members that he used a telescope to photograph a seminude woman who lived in the apartment below him, then proceeded to “enlarge the image and display it on the Teams meeting for all participants” to see, saying, “See, she’s got on her sexy panties. All kinds of people work naked. I get porn for free.”

On a separate Teams call, Berman allegedly remarked, “American women are dangerous. You can have sex with a European woman and nobody thinks anything of it, but you can have sex with an American woman and suddenly it’s rape.”

Lawsuit: Women given vibrators as ‘gifts’

During the September meeting in Des Moines, Berman allegedly invited Boughn and Hope to his hotel for a planned gift exchange. “Once they got to Berman’s room, he proceeded to turn the lights low and put on some music,” the lawsuit claims. Berman then gave Boughn and Hope their gifts, each with a card that read, “Manager meditation tool, earth to moon.”

The lawsuit alleges that “inside each bag was the same ‘gift’ — a large purple vibrator. Trisha and Amanda were visibly shocked and speechless. Berman broke the silence, saying with a big smile, ‘I want my managers to relax.’”

After Hope excused herself to use the restroom, “Berman grabbed Trisha’s head and forced his tongue into her mouth and down her throat,” the lawsuit alleges. “Trisha put her hands up, pulled back from Berman, and said, ‘Too much.’”

After Hope returned, the lawsuit claims, the two women left Berman’s room and Hope informed Boughn that Berman had once tried to kiss her while telling her she “had never been properly kissed.”

Two days later, as Hope and Boughn prepared to leave Des Moines, Berman allegedly requested a 15-minute meeting with them in the hotel lobby at which he angrily announced, “Starting now we are going to keep everything professional,” instructed Boughn and Hope to alert him if he was making them uncomfortable, and then blamed Boughn for ruining the weekend.

The lawsuit alleges that Boughn was distraught in the days that followed, aware that Berman was in prearranged meetings with the human resources staff and Telligen executives.

Hope, the lawsuit claims, shared with Boughn “inappropriate, flirtatious texts” she had received in the past from Dan Shipley, Telligen’s senior human resources business partner, which the lawsuit says undermined Boughn’s faith in human resources and its ability to properly handle any complaint she might file regarding Berman.

The lawsuit also claims Shipley once told Boughn about a time he and the female human resources director at Telligen had gone out drinking and the director got “very drunk” and was driving somewhere when he made her “stop the vehicle so he could urinate in the street.”

On Sept. 13, 2024, according to the lawsuit, Boughn reported Berman’s alleged sexual harassment and sexual assault to Telligen and, with the encouragement of human resources, she filed a police report on the incident. Days later, Telligen’s vice president, Neal Cohen, allegedly called Boughn to apologize for what happened on his watch. Berman was subsequently terminated, the lawsuit claims.

“Telligen then demoted Trisha,” the lawsuit alleges. “They (also) told Trisha the promotion Berman gave her was never approved, so she was not really a manager … Telligen promptly disinvited Trisha and Amanda from manager meetings to which they were previously invited.”

The lawsuit claims that when Boughn asked Telligen executives about the process used to hire Berman, they responded in a manner that indicated they “did not know much about Berman, despite hiring him for such an important position.”

The lawsuit alleges that Berman has a “known history of sexual harassment,” and that if Telligen had performed a background check or spoken to his previous employers, it “could have discovered he had multiple sexual harassment complaints filed against him at prior jobs and posed a threat to Telligen’s female employees.”

Berman, the lawsuit claims, “was wholly unqualified for a director position at Telligen” and had “virtually no understanding of how to do his job … He was unfamiliar with the nature of Telligen’s work and required significant time and explanation from staff to understand the organization’s activities.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for negligent hiring, negligent supervision, retaliation, and fostering a hostile work environment that led to sexual harassment.

Telligen has yet to file a response to the lawsuit, which was filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.

Telligen is a for-profit company that was first created in 1972 as the nonprofit Iowa Foundation for Medical Care. For years, the foundation was the federally designated quality improvement organization tasked with improving health care outcomes in Iowa and other states.

Between 2011 and 2013, the foundation merged with other entities and became Telligen, an employee-owned company that continues to work with state and federal governments on health care improvement.

This article was first published by Iowa Capital Dispatch.