NEW YORK CITY, NY — If the stories told by six janitors about the Equinox gym are true, there’s a lot more than abs, pecks, and glutes getting a good work out at the posh fitness center chain’s various yupscale locations.According to the six men, they’re disgusted by some of the messes that they have to clean up. When they were hired to keep the five Manhattan clubs neat and clean, they didn’t realize that they were signing up to work at what sounds more and more like an expensive gay bath house.
A suit filed in the Manhattan Supreme Court states that when they complained to management about the “explicit sexual activity” going on between the all-male clientele in the locker rooms, showers, saunas, and steam rooms, they were “ridiculed” and made to endure “hostile” treatment.
Chief operating officer Scott Rosen insists that “It’s just not an issue here at Equinox,” and, along with business officers, call the claims of free love at the clubs, including its flagship gym in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to be “frivolous.” The New York Daily News reports that investigations by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration allegedly found no evidence of “lewd behavior.”
Maybe that’s because the janitors had cleaned it up?
Whatever else may have happened, Jaisiin Bethea, Freddy Gonzalez, Omar Harris, Alex Mass, Rodney Vanterpool, and Jason Guishard have all resigned from their positions at Equinox and all insist that they regularly walked in on gym members in more than slightly compromising positions with one another. The man are asking for unspecified damages and claim that their civil and human rights have been violated.
