A lawsuit filed this month alleges that children of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden sexually harassed a former assistant of Wyden’s wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, who then retaliated against the assistant, terrorizing the employee to the point that he took his own life.
Bass Wyden, who owns New York City’s Strand bookstore and Bass Real Estate, said the lawsuit filed against her and her real estate company is “built on deliberate falsehoods and distortions.”
A spokesperson for the senator, who is not named as a defendant in the suit, referred questions to Bass Wyden’s companies.
The lawsuit, first reported by the New York Post, was filed by Thomas Maltezos, the husband of Brandon O’Brien. O’Brien worked as a personal assistant for Bass Wyden from June of 2022 to September of 2024 and frequently helped take care of Wyden’s and Bass Wyden’s children. The lawsuit accuses two of the children of sexually harassing O’Brien and discriminating against him based on his identity as a gay man, and it alleges that when O’Brien raised these concerns with the senator and his wife, that they “took no corrective action to provide a safe and harassment free work environment.”
Maltezos alleges that Bass Wyden’s teenage son used homophobic slurs against O’Brien, said that his football team would rape O’Brien because of his sexual orientation, and at one point threw things at O’Brien.
An administrative law judge, ruling on the question of whether O’Brien was entitled to unemployment benefits, wrote in February that Bass Wyden more than once heard her son use highly offensive slurs against O’Brien and admonished him for it – but did not cause the behavior to cease.
“There does not seem to be much disagreement that the employer’s children, more specifically her son, harassed (O’Brien),” judge Lorraine Ferrigno wrote in the February finding. “Additionally, there seems to not be a dispute that the employer found her son’s homophobic statements abhorrent and chastised him for them. However, they continued, and therefore I find that (O’Brien) had good cause to quit when he did.”
The lawsuit also accuses Wyden’s then-10-year-old daughter of making sexually explicit comments to O’Brien, demonstrating “inappropriate sexual behavior” and asking about his “intimate life.”
After O’Brien complained to Bass Wyden about the daughter’s conduct, Bass Wyden hired another person to transport the girl to and from school, but did not do so promptly, the lawsuit says.
When the Wydens wouldn’t take further action to protect O’Brien from harassment, Maltezos alleged, O’Brien quit in September of 2024. O’Brien died in May.
In a statement, Bass Wyden said that O’Brien quit working for her because he was about to be fired for stealing from her and her family.
But the administrative law judge, ruling on the unemployment benefits question, wrote that there was no evidence O’Brien knew when he resigned that Bass Wyden was preparing to fire him. And one of the son’s more egregious texts to O’Brien was sent to him just hours before he resigned, evidence in the unemployment case shows.
In her statement, Bass Wyden called the accusations against her children “deeply upsetting and out of context.” She accused O’Brien of employing a “calculated effort to groom and bait the children, then twist isolated interactions in a manipulative attempt to extort me.”
Bass Wyden said she was on the verge of firing O’Brien for stealing from the Wyden family when he quit. She said she’d decided to tell law enforcement about “egregious theft that had taken place over an extended period of time.”
Documents in the unemployment case show that Bass Wyden testified she discovered the alleged theft on Sept. 29, 2024, a Sunday, and that O’Brien resigned early the next morning before she could fire him.
The judge wrote that there was “no testimony or evidence” that O’Brien learned on Sunday that he would be fired Monday morning.
The Oregonian/OregonLive viewed a document that Bass Wyden filed to the FBI in which she cited an Oct. 1, 2024 police report that she says she filed with the New York Police Department against O’Brien, but not a copy of the police report itself. New York City police have not yet responded to requests by The Oregonian/OregonLive to release any reports as public records.
Maltezos alleges in the lawsuit that Bass Wyden falsely accused O’Brien of theft and credit card fraud as a means of retaliation. He says Bass Wyden spread “false rumors and defamatory statements” about O’Brien that interfered with his employment opportunities.
O’Brien died by suicide in May “as a result of the severe emotional distress he endured during and after his employment with defendants, compounded by defendants’ continued harassment through false rumors,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit accuses Bass Wyden of creating a hostile work environment, gender discrimination and wrongful death. Maltezos is seeking financial damages and wants a New York County judge to require Bass Wyden’s company to adopt training to prevent harassment, as well as policies for investigating complaints and disciplining people who are found to have abused an employees’ civil rights.
In response to the lawsuit, an attorney for Bass Wyden filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that O’Brien’s husband lacks appropriate legal standing because he has not yet been named as the official representative of O’Brien’s estate. The lawyer also filed a request to seal the case from public view. A hearing on that motion is scheduled for late October.
Bass Wyden wrote that she will “vigorously” defend herself in court, “confident that the truth will come out.”
“While this has been deeply distressing for me and my family, I do not believe it is appropriate or constructive to amplify the troubling behavior of someone who was clearly struggling with longstanding mental illness,” Bass Wyden said in a statement. “His death by suicide is a painful reminder of how serious and pervasive these struggles are and it underscores the critical importance of mental health support in our society.”
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