More than a year after suing his boss, Nghia Tran, the manager of a local manufacturing plant, is now a rich man.

A jury in federal court recently awarded him more than $5.4 million in a case where Tran reported that a woman was being sexually harassed at work.

That's right, $5.4 million, and no one ever laid a finger on him.

It all began in 2009 when Tran, who worked at Isolatek, which makes fire resistant materials, saw a female colleague being groped and kissed by the company's president and CEO, Giovanni Pacheco.

After the woman complained to Tran of being harassed, Tran told Pacheco directly and asked that Pacheco stop bothering the woman and apologize to her.

Tran says he did not hear back from Pacheco for several days until Tran was told to falsify the woman's work evaluation by writing her up for poor performance. Tran refused.

A month later, says Tran, he was fired.

Tran filed his lawsuit against Isolatek in November 2009, and a jury recently ruled unanimously in his favor, finding that the company fired him illegally for reporting the sexual harassment.

Tran, who according to the Metropolitan News-Enterprise was airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975 before coming to America with his family, was awarded $4 million for punitive damages and more than $1.4 million for lost earnings and emotional distress.

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