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The Panda Express cashier had already been forced to strip to her underwear in front of her fellow staff during a “self-improvement” seminar in 2019, she said, and told to open up to the group about her vulnerabilities.
But when a male colleague broke down crying while trying to do the same, the session’s leaders ordered her to go one step further: She had to “hug it out” with him, both of them still undressed, as others filmed her or ogled at her body, the 23-year-old employee in California said.
That was just part of a bizarre, psychologically abusive four-day seminar that “more and more resembled a cult initiation ritual as time went on,” according to a lawsuit she filed last month against the fast-food chain in Los Angeles County Superior Court.