A former employee filed a lawsuit against the NHL and the Anaheim Ducks on Tuesday alleging discrimination, sexual harassment, and bullying.
Rose Harris, who the suit says worked in IT for the Ducks and later the NHL, filed her 47-page complaint in the Southern District of New York. The suit says that Harris experienced harassment at the Ducks organization, spoke to HR after she was named as a witness by a whistleblower, and experienced retaliation while her alleged “most frequent harasser” was promoted. After resigning from the Ducks, Harris joined the NHL, but was quickly blacklisted and fired for accusations of email hacking, the suit says. The suit does not specify damages.
The Ducks and NHL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
After getting hired by the Ducks and parent company OC Sports & Entertainment in 2022, Harris says she was subjected to frequent nonconsensual touching from OCSE public relations intern Nick Aguilera. The suit says Aguilera and equipment manager Eric Philips both falsely told colleagues they had had sex with Harris. The filing says staffers made sexist comments about female employees’ clothing, including telling an intern she was “dressed like a whore,” and that Harris found a pornography site saved on a coworker’s web browser while she was fixing his computer. The lawsuit alleges gender discrimination when other employees denied Harris and a female colleague access to facilities where she was credentialed until getting male permission.
That female colleague, identified in the suit as Katherine Pearson, reported allegations of harassment and misconduct to the Ducks, and identified Harris as a witness and fellow victim, the suit says. The Ducks and OCSE interviewed Harris about her experiences in the summer and fall of 2023, but despite telling her what she had been through was “not okay” and “would be dealt with,” Harris was eventually told she “should consider looking elsewhere” if she wanted to continue a career in hockey operations, the lawsuit alleges. Aguilera was promoted to full-time, and the investigation closed without clear discipline for him or others despite finding it “more likely than not that some of the Company’s policies were violated by one or more employees,” the filing reads.
The suit says Harris faced retaliation after the investigation and was given more work without a bigger title or pay, while she and other female colleagues faced bullying from a new boss. Harris took a new job with the NHL, and was told by Ducks HR that she was “re-hirable” if she ever wanted to come back, the filing says.
Harris’s stint with the NHL in New York in January 2025 was brief. Weeks after starting, the league fired her, accusing her of reading the head of HR’s emails while servicing a tech issue, according to the complaint. Harris denied the allegation but was asked to turn her computer in directly to the HR chief, Patrice Distler, the suit says. Distler is also named as a defendant in addition to the Ducks and NHL.
The suit alleges that OCSE and the Ducks told the NHL that Harris was a witness in the team investigation, after which Distler and league executives “went about manufacturing” a reason to sack Harris because they wanted her “gone but they had no legitimate reason to fire her.” The Ducks are owned by Henry Samueli, cofounder of the chipmaker Broadcom.
According to the complaint, Harris didn’t get a job after several rounds of interviews with BSE Global—the parent company of the Barclays Center, Nets, and Liberty—after a recruiter told her they had “heard through the grapevine” about the NHL. She also tried to get rehired at the Ducks, but, the suit reads, following “months of delays and excuses things became clear: the NHL put the kibosh on Harris’s re-employment prospects with the Anaheim Ducks.”
