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- There is a lengthy history of lawsuits filed by current and former NJ Transit employees, resulting in massive payouts since 2009.
- Accusations of sexual misconduct against Kareem Howze date back to 2003, when he worked as a corrections officer, and then as early as 2016 at NJ Transit, but he wasn’t fired until 2021.
- NJ Transit’s handling of sexual misconduct cases often follows the same pattern, which results in dragging out lawsuits that end up being settled for large sums.
NJ Transit will pay a $9 million settlement to six former employees who accused their supervisor of forcibly kissing and touching them inappropriately, touching himself in their presence, and stalking.
It is one of the largest settlements in NJ Transit’s history.
Each of the six women — who are not named by NorthJersey.com because of the nature of their allegations — will receive $1.5 million, with a portion going to their attorney, Lisa Manshel of Florham Park-based Manshel Law, LLC.
“All six of these women showed tremendous courage, and I’m extremely proud to have represented them,” Manshel said. “They each came forward with allegations of terrifying stalking … sexual harassment and assault against a supervisor who seemed untouchable.”
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NJ Transit’s press office did not provide responses to multiple emailed questions from NorthJersey.com about the settlement.
NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri did not go into specifics about this case but said his priority is the safety of the more than 12,000 employees at the agency.
“I can’t solve for past problems, but all I can do is say we are focused on how do you cure and how do you correct for problems like this,” said Kolluri, who took the helm of the agency in January 2025. “People who are the victims of this kind of harassment should be protected.”
In addition to the settlement awards, NJ Transit paid more than $458,000 in mediation and legal fees to Marshall Dennehey P.C., the firm hired to defend the agency in these cases, which were litigated for more than four years.
As part of the settlement, there was no admission of liability and the women agreed to drop their lawsuits. All six women were forced to resign or retire in January as part of the settlements, which were obtained by NorthJersey.com through a public information request.
“There’s a problem with employers systemically removing — permanently removing — from the workplace those very women who have found a way to come forward and report sexual harassment and assault,” Manshel said. “That undermines the intended operation of this law, which tries to encourage employees to come forward.”
These settlement awards put an exclamation point on allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and retaliation that have persisted at NJ Transit for the last 17 years — and continue today.
Not including this $9 million settlement, NJ Transit has paid out at least $20 million since 2009 to 28 current and former employees who accused supervisors and peers of sexual assault, harassment and retaliation, and who said the agency did little or nothing to prevent the actions or address their claims.
Those are just the lawsuits known to NorthJersey.com, which has reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and settlement agreements related to the cases.
Complaints began in 2016, suit says
At the center of the allegations involving the six women is Kareem Howze.
Howze — who was not named as a defendant in the three cases filed in state Superior Court in Hudson County in 2021 and 2022 — was an NJ Transit bus supervisor assigned to the Greenville garage in Jersey City. In that role, he had access to a state-owned vehicle equipped with GPS that he allegedly used to follow bus operators.
The six women who filed the lawsuits were bus drivers assigned to the Greenville garage, but they were not the first to come forward with allegations about Howze, court documents said.
A different female bus driver allegedly complained to NJ Transit about being stalked and sexually harassed by Howze in 2016, but she was terminated for “alleged rules violation,” the lawsuits said.
After that, the six women alleged they endured years of Howze’s harassment, assault and stalking before coming forward, fearing they could be fired or subjected to retaliation.
In court records, they accused Howze of multiple forms of harassment:
- They alleged he boarded the drivers’ buses while they were on routes on multiple occasions, checked to make sure there were no passengers, and then cornered them and “forcibly kissed plaintiff, holding the back of her head while she tried to push away,” the lawsuits said.
- One woman alleged that Howze cornered her on elevators and masturbated “on numerous occasions for years.”
- One woman said she received an “anonymous” video of someone masturbating, which the woman said she believed was Howze because she recognized his voice, the lawsuits said.
- One woman said Howze once forced her to caress his genitals. On another occasion, he “bent her back, and put his tongue in her mouth,” and another time tried to grab her nipple, the suits said.
One woman made the first of many complaints about Howze in January 2020, one of the lawsuits said. Three others made formal complaints to the agency in late 2020, and two others followed in February 2021. The accusations were also brought to the attention of the state Attorney General’s Office before the lawsuits were filed, but nothing was done, they said.
Howze was suspended without pay in December 2020 but wasn’t fired until June 7, 2021, five days after a story about him ran in NorthJersey.com and The Record and 10 days after the first of the three lawsuits was filed.
Allegations predate NJ Transit
NJ Transit hired Howze in 2007, a year after he was fired from his role as a sergeant in the Hudson County Corrections Department.
He was fired from the Corrections Department after he got into a 2005 altercation with an inmate at the Kearny corrections facility. Howze ignored direction to let go of the inmate and had to be restrained by another sergeant who was injured trying to restrain Howze, according to witness testimony provided to the Civil Service Commission.
Howze also gave false information during an internal affairs investigation about the incident, testimony documents show.
Before that, three female corrections officers and a civilian employee accused Howze of stalking, harassing and assaulting them in 2003 and 2004.
Those accusations played no role in his firing, but they led to a lawsuit, which was settled in 2008 for $2 million, as the Corrections Department’s legal fees neared $1 million. Manshel, the attorney for the six NJ Transit employees, also represented the women at the Corrections Department.
‘Here’s another one’
NJ Transit has never addressed how Howze was hired there, given his firing and the accusations at the Corrections Department, nor how he remained employed at NJ Transit despite multiple accusations from several women over five years.
In late 2020, one of the female bus drivers reported Howze’s alleged behavior to her garage manager, who responded, “Here’s another one,” the lawsuits said.
“Plaintiff suffered a year of terror in 2020 that included ongoing stalking, touching and quid pro quo sexual harassment, all of which could have been prevented if … NJT had yet again not done nothing,” one lawsuit said.
Despite repeated formal complaints and accusations brought to supervisors, the agency allegedly did little or nothing to investigate or to prevent Howze from allegedly harassing and assaulting these drivers, court documents show.
The allegations raised by the six bus drivers are similar to those of current and former NJ Transit employees who have sued or are suing the agency over allegations that their supervisors harassed, assaulted or retaliated against them, and that the agency did not protect them after they came forward.
At NJ Transit, these cases often follow the same pattern: After exhausting the agency’s internal complaint system without desirable results, aggrieved employees sue, the cases drag on for years — one lasted more than nine years — and then the agency settles.
One of those ongoing cases was filed in July 2021 by a now-former NJ Transit rail car maintenance cleaner who accused a supervisor of sexually assaulting and harassing her.
The company substantiated her formal internal complaint against the employee and wrote a “no contact order,” but failed to enforce it, the lawsuit said. Manshel, who is also representing this woman, wrote in court documents that she approached the Attorney General’s Office to settle the case before suing, but that effort went nowhere.
The lawsuit remains in litigation almost five years later. A request for all attorneys’ bills in that case was not fulfilled because it was too voluminous and providing it would “disrupt the daily operations of this agency,” said the NJ Transit’s public information office.
Is there hope for a change?
In 2025, however, two cases did not follow the typical pattern of prior lawsuits.
Last April, NJ Transit paid a $90,000 settlement to a clerk in the agency’s Police Department, said the agreement, obtained by NorthJersey.com via a public information request.
This case never went to court, but it involved John Sullivan, a lieutenant in the NJ Transit Police Department, who has since been sued by two police officers who accused him of “a pattern and practice of harassment,” court records said. The reasons that prompted the settlement are not discussed in the agreement.
In a separate matter, in November, the agency suspended without pay its chief of human resources, Joel Gokool, after agency officials were informed of multiple complaints, including being in inappropriate relationships with NJ Transit employees. Gokool called the allegations “patently false.”
NJ Transit hired an outside law firm to do a “comprehensive review.”
Manshel said she hopes the settlement for her six clients — and the change in administration with a new governor — will lead to meaningful change at the agency.
Mikie Sherrill, who started her first term as governor in January, wrote in a Facebook post last year that she has “no tolerance for the normalization of sexual assault or support for those who cover up acts of predators.” The comment was in response to calls for the Seton Hall University president to resign after a report revealed he knew about sex abuse claims involving priests but did not report them.
“State agencies should be sending a message from the top down that sexual misconduct and any type of discrimination will not be tolerated,” Manshel said. “However, delays send the opposite message.”
“Given her words,” Manshel said of the governor, “we can hope that it means her new administration is prioritizing the prompt resolution of all pending sexual harassment and assault cases against state agencies.”
