If you're a saleswoman and get sexually assaulted while making a sales call, you'd like to think your boss wouldn't make you go back to that customer again.

But according to Southern California woman Carletta Beakes, she was not afforded that luxury.

Now she's suing her former employer, the telephone book and marketing company Yellow Book, claiming her boss ordered her to return to the home of the person who sexually assaulted her to complete the sales call.

According to the lawsuit, first reported by Courthouse News Service, Beakes was assaulted by a Yellow Book customer in January 2009. Immediately afterwards, she told her boss about the attack.

But Beakes claims she didn't exactly receive any sympathy.

Instead, she says that management “instructed” her to go back to the customer and complete the sales contract.

Beakes, understandably, refused, and reported the sexual assault to the cops. Beakes says she also learned that a colleague of hers had been attacked by the same customer several months earlier.

In May 2010, according to the lawsuit, the customer was sentenced to prison for his involvement in the attack against Beakes.

Beakes characterizes her boss' reaction to hearing she was assaulted as one of “indifference,” but does say that Yellow Book regional managers “expressed their shock and indicated that they were not advised of the severity of the incident.”

Still, last August Beakes says that she was fired. This, she says, was two months after her health care provider put her on medical leave due to the trauma of the attack and the ongoing stress of the criminal proceedings.

Beakes is suing Yellow Book for wrongful termination and is asking for, among other things, to be reinstated to her former job and to have her personnel record purged of the incident.

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