After landing her first corporate job while still in college, Kayla Smith thought she was finally on track for the D.C.-area real estate career she’d long imagined.
She was 22 and finishing her final semester at Towson University in Maryland four years ago when she was hired as a leasing consultant with Camden Development, a major apartment developer and property management firm that has appeared on Fortune’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list for 18 consecutive years.
Eager to get started, Smith didn’t think much about an element of Camden’s orientation materials that human resources specialists say is unusual: training videos promoting a workplace hugging culture. In a 2024 federal lawsuit, she claimed that the workplace culture played a role in a sexual assault by a co-worker.
Two training videos reviewed by The Washington Post and described in the lawsuit Smith filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia show Camden promoting a warm, family-style environment.
In one, employees are shown hugging in offices and hallways, and a woman says: “Camden culture is infectious. It truly grabs ahold of you and brings you in.” In a second required video, titled “The Hug Life,” a male narrator lays out the practice more directly: “Hugging is simply a part of who we are. … And now that you’re part of the Camden family, we look forward to hugging you too.”
Camden has also promoted its hugging culture in public-facing materials. A 2012 company blog post titled “Have You Hugged Someone Today?” describes employees as “huggers” and mentions “remedial hugging classes” for co-workers who don’t hug. It ends with the line: “But remember — only hug the willing!”
“I’m not a big hugger, but I’ve learned to become a hugger,” a woman says in a video posted to the company’s official YouTube channel more than a decade ago.
In court filings, Camden said it does not have a hugging policy but said the “Hug Life” video demonstrated what it called a “profound culture of caring and family” among employees. The company noted in a statement to The Post that a judge has dismissed several of Smith’s claims.
Smith said in an interview that while she initially found Camden’s emphasis on physical affection to be “a little off-putting, maybe odd,” she thought it was ultimately harmless. But she noted that the videos never discussed boundaries, appropriate limits on hugging or how to decline physical contact.
At work, hugs were common among leasing consultants, managers and even contractors — and typically uneventful, Smith said. A maintenance manager for one of the Camden properties had hugged her several times in shared spaces, which she did not consider unusual. She also said he often made personal comments, including that she was his “favorite” and that she made his day better.
Eventually, according to court filings, the dynamic took a darker turn. Her complaint says that while she and the maintenance manager were alone inside an empty apartment in March 2023, he asked for a hug, locked the door in the middle of their embrace and refused to let go. She alleged that when she asked him to stop, he didn’t, and instead groped and kissed her while holding her in place for more than 20 minutes before releasing her and leaving.
“I think I was just initially in shock and scared, kind of embarrassed too,” Smith said during the interview.
In a statement, Raymond R. Jones, an attorney for the maintenance manager, whom The Post is not naming because he has not been charged with a crime, denied engaging in any wrongful conduct as well as Smith’s account of the March 2023 incident.
Smith said in her lawsuit that after gathering herself that day, she called a trusted co-worker to the building. Together they contacted her manager, who instructed her to take some time off. Smith went on leave the same day and never returned to Camden; the maintenance manager’s employment ended shortly afterward, the company said in its response to an equal employment opportunity complaint filed by Smith in 2023. He now lives in Florida, according to court filings.
Smith said her mother raised the idea of filing a police report, but, she said, she felt too anxious to pursue it in the days after the incident and did not do so, fearing that her account wouldn’t be believed. Still, she said she couldn’t push the encounter out of her mind. After Smith described the company’s hugging culture, she said, her mother was surprised — a realization Smith later said pushed them toward legal action.
“With my mom’s support, I realized that this was very unusual,” Smith said.
Five hugs per day
In her lawsuit against Camden and the maintenance manager, Smith alleges that Camden’s culture blurred professional boundaries and made it difficult to decline physical contact at work. The maintenance manager, she alleged, engaged in harmful and offensive touching without consent despite her protests.
Camden has pushed back against Smith’s allegations, arguing in court filings that it never mandated physical contact between co-workers and that the onboarding videos were not a policy.
Camden further said that it had no reason to believe Smith objected to the hugs and argued that the interactions she described — including those shown in the onboarding videos — did not amount to harassment.
The company has maintained that all employees must complete standard anti-harassment courses and that Smith received the written policies in effect at the time.
But Smith contends that the courses never explained how to navigate or decline unwanted physical contact, something she argues was especially important in a workplace where hugs were common. She said in an interview that she saw upward of five hugs per day, including from her manager, who routinely embraced staff each morning.
She recalled how a male leasing consultant said he tried to shorten or avoid hugs because he was married and “didn’t want to come across the wrong way.”
U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly dismissed Smith’s harassment and discrimination claims under both federal and D.C. law, ruling in December 2024 that the conduct she alleged was not, on its face, sexual or discriminatory. But the judge allowed two claims to move ahead: battery against the maintenance manager and negligence against Camden, writing that whether the company took reasonable steps to prevent harm couldn’t be answered without more evidence. A trial date has not yet been set.
In its statement, Camden emphasized the judge’s dismissal of the discrimination-based claims and said it “looks forward to vindicating itself” on the remaining negligence claim.
The case has moved into a contentious discovery phase. Camden has argued that the negligence claim should be limited to Smith’s individual training history, and it has resisted her attorney’s requests to produce materials that could shed more light on how the hugging culture functioned companywide, including internal communications, historical handbooks and complaints.
In September, Kelly ruled that Smith is entitled to explore not just her training but also the broader culture of hugging at the company, including previous concerns that it may have generated within Camden.
A previous incident
As part of discovery, Smith’s attorneys received a 2018 internal human resources record documenting an incident involving the same maintenance manager. According to the record, a resident at one of Camden’s properties told a community manager that the maintenance manager followed her to her floor and hugged her, rubbing her back “a bit.” The encounter, the resident reported, made her uncomfortable. She declined to file a formal complaint but asked that it be noted.
The record says the maintenance manager claimed he did not understand why the resident felt uncomfortable and believed she had been drinking. It also notes that no similar concerns about him had been received at the time. His attorney said in the statement that he disputes the resident’s account as described, adding that the maintenance manager was never disciplined or given an opportunity to respond to it.
Julie Schweber, a human resources specialist who reviewed the lawsuit and Camden’s public messaging, says the company’s approach is atypical. Schweber, who is a lead knowledge adviser at the Society for Human Resources Management, a professional umbrella organization, said that she has never seen a company encourage routine hugging among its staff in her 20 years in the field.
“Hugging is not universally accepted in the workplace; it’s a place of business,” she said, noting that a culture that promotes physical touch may place undue pressure on employees who feel they cannot opt out. “So it’s just opening a can of worms that in today’s ‘MeToo,’ more aware environment, is really setting up a risky type of culture,” Schweber said.
Employment lawyers who examined Smith’s complaint echoed that view, adding that when companies promote cultural norms — even informally — employees can experience them as expectations.
“Whether or not this policy is in some 50-page handbook really makes no difference,” said Jessica Westerman, a partner at the D.C. firm Katz Banks Kumin who has represented workers in harassment and misconduct cases. “You’re inviting people to engage in physical touch in a way that is totally inappropriate and risky in the employment setting.”
Camden Development’s parent company, Camden Property Trust, was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Houston. It manages nearly 60,000 apartments nationwide and has long marketed its workplace environment as a competitive strength in the real estate labor market. The company employs 1,600 people across the country and frequently appears on “best places to work” lists, highlighting employee satisfaction in its public statements. A review of court records did not turn up prior lawsuits alleging problems with Camden’s workplace environment.
In the District, Camden operates multiple large buildings where leasing consultants work closely with staff and residents. Smith said she excelled at her job.
Smith, now 27, said she spent months trying to steady herself after her departure. She was unemployed for more than half a year before taking a job at a beauty company staffed entirely by women — a choice she now sees as a way of feeling safe at work again.
More recently, she joined the office services team of a consulting firm, a detour that she says left her further from the real estate career she once imagined.
The environment is friendly but not a place where a lot of hugging occurs, she said.
“They said they were like a big family, that they enjoyed hugging each other,” Smith said of Camden. “That’s just what they do there — they hug.”
The post This company encouraged hugs. An ex-employee says that led to sexual assault. appeared first on Washington Post.
