I was forced to resign a position at a Global 50 company after 15 years with a perfect review history. I believe I was railroaded by 2 managers (husband & wife), 1 CIO and 1 peer. I am sure they were all involved at some point. I think they did it because I was getting too close to something they were involved in. I had access to all data corporate wide. My wife still works there. That was their leverage. These things happen and my wife and I decided I should move on. 2 days after I quit, the aforementioned peer wanted to meet for a beer. Not having a clear picture of what had happened, I agreed. I sat down to a beer he had already ordered and I drank. On my second beer I became violently ill. He "Visined" me. It was pretty bad with some residual effects not subsiding. This is not the first time this person has done something malicious and he was formally reprimanded by HR. It also had taken place outside work and with a former employee.

A few weeks went by and I decided to make him squirm a little. I wrote an email, addressed to the head of HR at the company, describing the poisoning at the restaurant in full detail. Addressed to the HR person I sent it only to the peer. The next day my wife came home and said that one of the aforementioned managers said "I do bad things with email." I found out that the manager covered the whole thing up. This manager is good friends with the CIO.

In the weeks that have followed I have noticed some blurring of vision. I did not have this problem before the poisoning.

1st question: Can I sue the company for harboring this criminal behavior?

2nd question: If so, what area of law would this fall under?

Thanks ahead for your comments.

Criminal behavior is the problem of the criminal - in this case the individual you are theorizing might have poisoned you. The company is legally allowed to hire all the criminals they want to - UNLESS those persons are in positions where a criminal history would cause licensing issues (convicted felon, registered sex offender, etc.) The course of action if you suspect such a crime is to report it to police - but at this point you'll have just about ZERO in the way of evidence to support a claim of poisoning. Unless you just happened to have had blood drawn the night in question after the drinks, you really have nothing to go on - and even if you DID have a blood test that indicated poisoning - that's still not proof that the individual in question did it.

Police are the only agency who has any possible duty to respond to a complaint of criminal behavior (and legally even police aren't REQUIRED to respond). Your employer isn't obligated to pursue a criminal investigation. They COULD be held liable in civil court if they had prior knowledge that an employee had accusations of criminal behavior against another employee and failed to keep them separated - but when you quit, that took care of that issue for them - effectively separating the parties.

At this point, you have no police report, no conclusive independent medical evaluation that would indicate poisoning....right?

Any defense attorney will LOVE that. It makes a person much less sinister to a jury when you know all this horrible stuff and have such grave suspiciouns about a person, yet STILL choose to go out and drink with the person - especially outside work when there was no obligation to do so.

Bottom line? File a police report. If there's ANYWHERE for this case to go, it'll start there. However, given that you've no proof of criminal poisoning, don't expect much to come from it.

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I have to agree with aardvarc on this one. You should have contacting the police as soon as this happened. Have you browsed through the information in LawInfo's Free Legal Resource Center to learn more about your issue yet? See: http://www.lawinfo.com/consumer.html. You can certainly try to speak to a lawyer to determine what legal options may be available. In the meantime, you may be able to learn more on your own. Search the "Free Legal Resources" tab, or browse the Consumer Resources. Good luck.