N.Y. Fire Dept. Sanctioned For 'Badonkadonk' Comments

July 31, 2014
A former female firefighter with Elmont Truck Co. 1 won a $60,000 judgment against the department because of crude comments and slaps on her buttocks.

She didn’t volunteer for that!

The state hit a Long Island fire department with a $25,000 fine and awarded a female smoke-eater $60,000 over a loudmouth lieutenant’s exclamation of “badonkadonk” as he slapped the volunteer’s rear end.

Single mom Beatrice Lozada, 35, filed the Division of Human Rights complaint against Elmont’s Truck Company No. 1 in 2011, saying the higher-up repeatedly made the crude remark — slang for a woman’s buttocks — around the firehouse when she worked there in 2006 and 2007.

Other firefighters soon followed his lead.

“They made a lot of comments about my body. I have a very big butt and they would make a lot of comments about that,” Lozada told The Post on Wednesday, saying the taunting drove her to cover her curves while on duty.

“I had to dress like a boy, talk like a boy, because I wanted to be as unattractive as possible,” she said. “They said ‘badonkadonk.’ They would say, ‘You have a fat ass.’ ”

In his July 23 ruling, Administrative Law Judge Robert Tuosto said the lieutenant slapped her “posterior so often that she got to the point that she was afraid to walk in front of him.”

And he specifically singled out his “use of a vulgarism to describe a part of her body” in awarding the five-figure sum., adding that the Elmont firemen “acted more like members of a college fraternity rather than those sworn to protect the public against fire emergencies.”

The normally staid Division of Human Rights even cites in its ruling the Urban Dictionary definition of the word: “Extremely curvaceous female buttocks.”

But the taunts didn’t end with “badonkadonk”: Lozada also received a text from one of her 35 male co-workers during a firehouse meeting in 2009 that read, “I want to eat your p—-,” the ruling revealed. Because fellow smoke-eaters laughed when Lozada showed a particularly vulgar text to a colleague, they must have been in on the cruel joke, Tuosto noted.

Lozada said the lurid comments made her feel “powerless and hurt.”

“I felt like I did a lot for the fire service,” Lozada said, getting choked up as she added, “To be treated like that,” before her voice trailed off.

She eventually transferred to EMS, which has more women in its ranks.

Lozada attorney Steven Morelli said, “Beatrice did this so that other women would not have to be treated like this just because they want to help their community.”

Elmont Fire Department officials declined to comment, but firefighters at Truck Company 1 said the lieutenant in question was no longer stationed there.

The station’s attorney did not return calls.

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