A psychologist told the prospective employee he allegedly groped that her job duties would include sexually gratifying male and female patients, the woman said yesterday.
“He even told me there might be oral sex involved,” Ana Sola recalled of her “very strange” job interview with Dr. William Swan in 2002.
She said he told her it wasn’t a big deal.
“I want to assure you there won’t be any penetration,” she quoted Swan as saying.
She also said he told her she would need to apply some of his special “therapeutic massage” techniques on him.
The Spanish beauty is suing Swan in Manhattan Supreme Court for assault and battery, charging he groped her while demonstrating his innovative massage technique on her.
Swan denies touching her at all, and said she was the one who suggested giving clients “squigglies” – her euphemism for a very intimate form of touching.
Sola, a former model and birthing coach who now works as a waitress in Miami, told jurors Swan was interviewing her for a position as a co-trainer for his “Assertiveness Training: the Relaxation Method” program.
She was told the program was aimed at helping patients “increase assertiveness following traumatic or fearful events.”
It was during her second interview at Swan’s East Side office that he told her he wanted to demonstrate his massage technique on her, and to go into his bathroom and change into a bathrobe, she testified.
She said Swan had her lie down on some towels on the floor, and started rubbing her shoulders, asking her to rate her comfort level for what he was doing on a scale of minus three to plus three.
He slid the robe down her shoulders, and when he noticed she still had a bra on, he tried to take it off, Sola said. She said she told him to stop – and he told her it was all a part of his “therapy.”
After calming her down with “professional” jargon, Swan moved down to rub her feet, and then slid his hand up under robe and up to her buttocks.
“I said, ‘Stop! What are you doing?’ He said, ‘You left your panties on as well?’ I said, ‘Of course,'” Sola said.
“At this moment I started to feel this massage was very strange,” she said.
He asked her her comfort level and she said, “Minus 24.”
It was then that he told her that her duties would include satisfying aroused patients, Sola testified.
She said when she left, Swan handed her an envelope that she later discovered contained $100 as payment for her “training” session.
Sola’s lawyer, Gary Certain, played a tape recording of a phone conversation Sola had with Swan the next day, when he called her to see how she was doing.
On the tape, she asked why he touched her, and after lots of stumbling, the management consultant told her “we attempted to work something out” and “I paid you the fee.”
In a later conversation – after he’d spoken to his lawyer – he said he didn’t know what she was talking about.