A former top executive at the U.S. subsidiary of Japan's largest advertising agency is alleging his boss found a peculiarly Japanese way of sexually harassing him -– by demanding that he have sex with a prostitute.

Steve Biegel served as creative director of Dentsu America from May 2003 until he was fired in November 2006. In an unusual male-on-male sexual harassment suit filed this week in New York, he claims Dentsu America CEO Toyo Shigeta took him to a Prague brothel called “Escade” during a June 2004 business trip.

After Shigeta noticed Biegel and another U.S. executive, Scott Weitz, were not mingling with the prostitutes, the complaint says, he “accused them of being 'no fun' and stormed off.” He later allegedly returned with five or six prostitutes and selected two of them for Biegel and Weitz, “stating, 'You –- him! You –- him!'”

The two Americans, who are both married, went with the women to private rooms but “refused to engage in any sexual activity” with them. “Defendant Shigeta, upon information and belief, did have sex with a prostitute he had selected for himself,” Biegel alleges.

According to Biegel, Shigeta “maintained that having sex with prostitutes was a 'Japanese' style of conducting business” and had once told him he sealed a deal with another Japanese businessman “not with a handshake” but by having a threesome with a prostitute.

Biegel, however, “was horrified, offended and humiliated by [the] debasing experience of being forced to attend a brothel imposed on him as a condition of employment.”

The suit identifies other instances of Shigeta “inject[ing] his sexual obsessions into the work required for Dentsu:”

• At a commercial shoot for Canon, a Dentsu client, in Florida, Shigeta allegedly used a telephoto lens to take a surreptitious “crotch shot” of the commercial's star, tennis pinup Maria Sharapova.

• After taking Biegel to a Japanese bathhouse in Tokyo, the suit says, Shigeta required him to “parade naked in front of several men.”

In a statement, Dentsu said the allegations were “outrageous” and the plaintiff was suing over incidents “which he never complained about while an employee of Dentsu. The company intends to counterclaim that Mr. Biegel has libeled Dentsu and defrauded the company.”

But Biegel claims he was fired in retaliation for complaining to Shigeta about the bathhouse incident and threatening to report him to human resources for his “sexually inappropriate conduct.” After Biegel's complaint, Shigeta was promoted to CEO of Dentsu Holdings.

Escade's website describes the establishment as the “biggest erotic club” in Prague. “If you want to buy lady-companion for all night, we'll suprise [sic] you by an interesting discount,” it says.

By Matthew Heller
11/1/07