A New Jersey police department is under fire for allegedly letting officers pick on fellow cops with a large sex toy and allowing the harassment to go unchecked for years, a lawsuit filed last week said.
Five Mountainside police officers and one employee filed a lawsuit against the borough for allowing “harassing, inappropriate and illegal conduct” to occur, the New York Post reported Thursday.
The accusations include people being hit in the head with a sex toy – nicknamed "Big Blue" – as well as being forcibly tickled, assaulted with a flashlight and flashed by the genitalia of other officers, the paper reported.
Officers Christopher Feighner, Richard Latargia, Thomas Norton, Jeffrey Stinner, and James Urban and employee Amy Colineri were named as making the accusations against Officers Thomas Murphy and Andrew Huber, who were allegedly creating a “hostile work environment.”
Huber allegedly started to use the sex toy to harass his colleagues sometime between 2007 and 2008 and it was used on multiple occasions despite being thrown out and multiple complaints made, the Post reported.
Huber also allegedly attacked a dispatcher with the sex toy, while Murphy filmed.
“Huber stuck Big Blue in the male dispatcher’s face and hit him over the head with it,” the paper reported, citing the complaint. “Murphy laughed and stated, ‘Get him,’ ‘What’s it smell like,’ and ‘I hope it doesn’t smell like what I think it smells like.'”
Officers would also take part in a game where one person would take out his genitalia and put it on someone’s food or in someone’s drink, the complaint said.
Huber and Murphy were eventually placed on administrative leave, but not until top officials learned of the lawsuit, according to the New York Post.
Mountainside police haven’t commented on the complaints.