MUSKOGEE (LN) — A federal magistrate judge in Oklahoma on Monday allowed a wrongful termination claim to proceed against a businessman and his network of companies, ruling that allegations of sexual coercion and unwanted physical contact in a foreign country fall outside the state's employment discrimination law and into the territory of personal invasion — while tossing two negligence theories built on a criminal sexual battery statute and a federal tax penalty provision.
Heather Lyn Ochab worked as Danny Joe Ray's personal assistant and as office manager for his businesses — Big Poppa's, LLC, Big Poppa's 2, LLC, Victory Farms Stallion Station, Inc., and BP Idabel, LLC — from approximately June 2020 through July 2023. She alleges Ray fostered a sexually charged workplace from the start, making graphic sexual comments, hiring women based on physical appearance, discouraging the hiring of lesbians, and requiring physical morning hugs.
The case turned on a 2023 safari trip to Tanzania that Ray invited Ochab to join, purportedly as a reward for her work. Ochab alleges she told Ray multiple times before departure that the trip was not sexual in nature and that she would not engage in sexual activity with him. Once in Tanzania, she says, Ray told her there was no separate tent and required her to sleep in his bed for safety — though she later alleges a separate tent had been available. On June 27, she alleges, Ray rubbed her leg until she pushed his hand away and told him to stop.
After she continued to refuse his advances, Ochab alleges, Ray canceled her return flight, refused to buy another, and shut off cellular service to her company-issued phone while she was traveling home. When she returned to Oklahoma, she was no longer employed by defendants.
Defendants argued her wrongful termination claim — a Burk tort under Oklahoma law — was barred by the Oklahoma Anti-Discrimination Act, which provides the exclusive state remedy for employment discrimination. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jason A. Robertson disagreed, relying on the Oklahoma Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Baughman v. World Acceptance Corp., which drew a line between harms arising from employment governance and harms arising from independent personal torts.
In Baughman, the court had preempted an emotional distress claim where the alleged harm flowed entirely from a supervisor's handling of medical leave, FMLA communications, and termination procedures — what the Baughman court characterized as quintessential allegations of disability discrimination. Ochab's allegations, Robertson held, were categorically different: "The alleged wrong is not discrimination administered through employment governance; it is alleged personal invasion carried out through the abuse of authority over a subordinate employee."
Robertson dismissed two other counts without hesitation. Count 3 attempted to recast the Tanzania touching as negligence per se under Oklahoma's criminal sexual battery statute, 21 O.S. § 1123(B), which prohibits intentional touching of intimate areas without consent. Robertson held the doctrine cannot reach that far: "A statute defining intentional sexual battery cannot be converted into a negligence duty without rewriting its operative terms." Count 10 tried a similar move with 26 U.S.C. § 6672, the federal payroll tax penalty provision, arguing that defendants' alleged practice of paying wages partly off the books reduced Ochab's reported earnings and future Social Security benefits. Robertson rejected that theory under Alexander v. Sandoval, noting that the provision "identifies no protected private class, creates no individual entitlement, and authorizes no private enforcement" — its duties run to the Treasury, not to employees.
Ochab also filed a notice of supplemental authority pointing to a 2026 Supreme Court concurrence by Justice Thomas in Ellingburg v. United States, which drew on historical distinctions between public and private wrongs and analogized theft to an employer's violation of IRS payroll duties. Robertson was unpersuaded on all three grounds: a concurrence is not binding precedent, the public-private taxonomy is descriptive rather than a source of enforceable rights, and the analogy collapses because theft directly violates an identifiable private right while the payroll tax duty runs to the federal fisc.
The wrongful termination claim now heads toward discovery, where Ochab will have to show the termination contravened a clear mandate of Oklahoma public policy — the substantive Burk tort element Robertson left for another day.