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Marie Eiffel Market has some barriers to entry. Like the prices, which some local Shelter Islanders (and even some wealthy summer visitors) have lately started to think are extreme. The lobster roll is $45, a pint of berries recently hit double digits — steep for an island that likes to think of itself as the sleepy inverse of the Hamptons. And then there is Marie Eiffel herself, the bawdy Frenchwoman who owns the place. Regular customers can’t help notice her habit of screaming at young employees and making sexual remarks to customers. But — well, she is French, and the croissants are really good, and the roast chicken is the thing for takeout dinner. Plus where else on the island can one sit with an iced coffee on a dock and watch sailboats bobbing in a picturesque harbor? “A lot of people will go in there because it is the only game in town as far as prepared food that’s on the higher-quality side,” said one Shelter Island local. “It’s easy, and they all think that she’s hysterically funny.”
Despite those not-uncommon sightings of Eiffel lambasting her staff, many island residents were surprised when the Shelter Island Reporter came out with a story this month that a number of former employees hired from abroad had filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Marie Eiffel of human trafficking and battery — claiming she groped them, spanked them, grabbed them, choked them, and stole their wages — and asking a jury to award them lost wages and punitive damages. One woman alleged that Eiffel slid her finger down her pants and stuck it “between the cheeks of her buttocks and touched her anus” while she was helping a customer. Another described a less-serious situation wherein “Marie ordered an employee to record her spanking an employee on the buttocks with a bunch of parsley while she laughed at the camera.” (The suit included a photo allegedly of Eiffel mid-spank, parsley in hand, grin across her face.) There were also allegations that Eiffel routinely underpaid her workers and withheld tips; according to one of the plaintiff lawyers, the human-trafficking claims stem from the allegations of wage theft, physical and psychological abuse, and threats of economic harm.
For the small, insular island, reachable only by ferry, this was news at the level of the unsolved 2018 attack on a local priest. On Facebook pages, over chats in neighbors’ yards, the reaction has been split. Some defend her, accusing her young ex-employees of generational oversensitivity to the finer points of French humor. Others are enjoying the comeuppance, despite the fact that it may have disastrous consequences for the market. “The complaint describes disturbing and egregious conduct,” said Elizabeth Saylor, director of employment law at Legal Aid. “If the allegations are proved at trial, a jury award could be in the millions.”
“I thought, Karma,” another longtime resident told me upon reading the lawsuit. Eiffel had long ago worn out her welcome among his cohort of locals. The suit overlapped with the stories he had heard from friends whose kids worked at the café — “She yelled and would get unusually angry over very small things” — and he said that some people resented the way she catered to the rich and famous, bringing South Fork vibes to an island that saw itself as more aligned with the sleepy North Fork. “There’s an unavoidable vanity piece,” he said. “A self-promoter on an island like that? That doesn’t fly.”
Marie Eiffel moved to Shelter Island after a friend invited her to cook a Christmas dinner in 2004. Within a few months, she’d opened a consignment store: “Almost nobody came in,” she later told the Shelter Island Reporter, “but they all thought I had good taste.” She opened a “French-inspired” clothing boutique (and another in nearby Greenport). And in 2013, she opened her eponymous market in a space that had recently been run by Matt Danzer and Ann Redding (they went on to open the Nolita Thai restaurant Uncle Boons). By then, Eiffel loomed over the island, a rare attention-seeker in a place that valued privacy. The cafe’s website would eventually invite visitors to “get a taste of the best French food and biggest personality on Shelter Island.” She held court there nearly every day, arriving before it opened at 7 a.m. She often shared her larger-than-life story: about her time with a French troupe of comedic actors, the film she was fired from for slapping the director, her stint working for a celebrity business coach in New York City, and the horrific car accident she suffered in 2002, when she rolled over on the Long Island Expressway and flatlined in the hospital. This incident, her website says, “reincarnated her as a tastemaker.” It also changed her name. Born Françoise Lapostolle, she told the Reporter she began calling herself Marie Eiffel after the accident — it was her father’s nickname for her.
“She’s sort of the resident wackadoo,” one local said. “And the fact that she’s French makes that an exotic wackiness.” Some found her “charming in a sort of rude, French way,” a longtime visitor said. One such person was Gerard Araud, the former French ambassador to the United States. An occasional summer visitor to the island, he met Eiffel when he stopped by her market and became so impressed with her life story — “the American Dream with a French accent” — that he nominated her to become a chevalier. She received the award in a ceremony at the in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Others just thought she was rude. “She’s charging something like 15 bucks for a thing of blueberries, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just out of curiosity, like, why? Are these from France?’” said Jay Bulger, a filmmaker who often visits the island. “She said something along the lines of, ‘I guess you can’t afford it!.’”
She was especially polite to her celebrity clientele. “When the celebrities were there, she was at her best,” said Rakhat Mamytova, a former employee. She recalled her boss offering a mushroom soup to Jessica Chastain, who she knew was a vegan, or hustling her employees to work faster when Uma Thurman stopped by. This was an effective strategy: Over the years, Eiffel insinuated herself into difficult-to-infiltrate pockets of the island’s social scene, becoming friends with André Balazs (who owns the other establishment on the island that a lot of locals roll their eyes at, the hotel and restaurant Sunset Beach), and his ex-wife Katie Ford, the former CEO of Ford Models. During the summer, she’d mingle with high-powered French chefs like Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud who would come to Sunset Beach to play pétanque. Over the years, she co-hosted with Ford a number of fundraisers for Freedom for All, Ford’s anti-human-trafficking charity, including one last year at the Standard Hotel. During COVID, she raised $179,000 to keep her business afloat with the GoFundMe page showing donations from celebrities like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Louis C.K., who owns a home on the island. (This brought a wave of resentment from locals who believed Eiffel’s haul had come at the expense of other, less flashy businesses in need, like the preschool.) “She’s the perfect symbol of an extractive out-of-towner, catering only to the ultrawealthy,” said Jodi Bentivegna, a former captain of one of the island ferries. A letter to the editor in the Reporter described the kerfuffle as “croissant and latte versus meat and potatoes.”
Marie wasn’t cowed. In a June article in the New York Post’s “Page Six” about her plans to expand her empire with a “huge concept store” full of antiques and jewelry, Eiffel mentioned making a run for town supervisor in three years. In the Shelter Island Facebook group, reactions varied from “Soon the island will be renamed Eiffel Island” to “As long as the Pear-Almond Tarts keep coming and the canalé are fresh she can appoint herself Admiral of the North Ferry for all I care.”
Despite these mixed feelings, plenty of Shelter Islanders sent their kids to work for Eiffel over the years. Her staff was a mix of the children of summer people looking for a job, some working-class local kids, and a never-ending supply of workers coming from overseas through what is known as the J-1 visa program. These so-called non-immigrant exchange visas, which let foreigners work for a single employer for a limited period of time, are common at seasonal restaurants in vacation spots like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Shelter Island. J-1 recipients often come from developing countries. While it can give young people a way to visit America and earn some money, the program has had problems. “Wage theft, retaliation, physical threats, and human trafficking are among the countless abuses of J-1 workers documented in news reports and litigation over the years,” read a 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute, which argued that the J-1 program is often “used as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.”
And on September 1, it was eight of these workers — six women and two men from Malaysia, Thailand, Ecuador, and Colombia — who filed suit against the J-1 staffing agency InterExchange and Eiffel, claiming she groped them, spanked them, grabbed them, choked them, and stole their wages. The initial pretrial conference is set for December 14, and Eiffel’s lawyer said she plans to fight the claims. (InterExchange did not respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit and its claims.)
Over the past week, I spoke with 13 former employees of Eiffel’s. A few described a fun, nutty boss — who, yes, liked to grab her employees’ butts but in a way they were able to laugh off easily. Others described a toxic atmosphere that left them wondering, even years later, how Eiffel could have kept behaving the way she did in plain sight of the island for so long.
At work, former employees said, Eiffel ran hot and cold; she’d flip on a dime from her cheerful, flirty manner into harshly berating her employees, at least one of whom was as young as 13. (With very limited exceptions, it’s illegal for children under 14 to work in New York.) Eiffel liked everything to be done a certain way. And if things were not done correctly, she’d scream at employees — loudly and publicly.
Or she’d spank them. “She was just very handsy and very hilarious,” said one former summer employee. “I was like a toy.” “She would grab my ass, but I liked it,” said his friend and former co-worker. “You can laugh about any of it. But I don’t know. I’m also a rich white kid.”
Other former employees were not as fond of the spanking. One who worked at the market when she was 14 recalled Eiffel coming up behind her and spanking her out of the blue with a large wooden pizza spatula. She was startled, but “everyone just kind of chalked up her crazy behavior to like, ‘Oh, that’s just Marie being Marie,’” she said. Another worker, who took a job at the shop at age 13, said Eiffel spanked him almost every day, often while urging him to work faster. “She would do it in front of the customers,” he said. And you couldn’t avoid it. “Because,” said one woman, who began working there when she was 14, “if you try to maneuver your way out of it, she’d just say ‘I’ll spank you harder.’”
Sometimes it went further. “When I was at the register, she would grab my ass, from behind, grope me, and she’s like, ‘You have a nice ass,’” said the worker who was 13 when he worked there. He recalled another incident where he watched Eiffel pull up the dress of a woman working at the cash register. She “grabbed her butt cheeks, and she’s like, ‘She has a nice ass,’ The customer just stood there uncomfortably.” A friend of his, 16 at the time, recalls Eiffel going in for a hug: “Then she started groping my breasts, and she’s like, ‘You have little Brussels sprouts.’” A third friend, 14 at the time, also recalled Marie squeezing her butt at work. Yet another former teenage employee, then 17, said that “Marie would come up behind me sometimes and put her hand on my lower back and whisper in my ear, ‘Oh, do you like that?’”
For her, the most unsettling part of this behavior was how it routinely happened in plain sight. It felt like Eiffel took some kind of pleasure in being able to dominate her young employees in front of the customers. “We were like cattle on display,” she said. “It felt like people were coming into the restaurant almost sometimes to watch us be torn apart.” Why, she wondered, didn’t anyone step in outside the occasional pity tip or a muttered comment that they didn’t deserve to be treated that way? Said another: “She’d grope us in front of the customers. Who were mostly rich city people. I really believe they didn’t really give a shit about us.”
Not everything happened out in the open. “She used to get physically abusive,” wrote Rakhat Mamytova, who came to the café from Kyrgyzstan on a J-1 visa, in an email to her lawyer in 2017. “She could easily slap people on their head or grab their arms very hard. I felt weak to stop her from doing such things.” Early on in her employment, Mamytova was in the middle of her shift when she ate a single 25 cent candy off the shelf. Eiffel asked her sharply: “Did you just steal a candy?” Mamytova laughed her off: “Yes, I did have it. But I did not steal it. It’s 25 cents! Go take it from my tip jar!”
She says Eiffel grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the bathroom, where she launched into a lecture about the ills of thievery. “I’m done with this,” Mamytova said and tried to leave the bathroom. Eiffel yanked her back in by the neck of her sweater. Mamytova began crying, and Eiffel told her, “‘I like to see people crying because that means they’re having a breakthrough.” Later, when showing co-workers the abrasion on her neck from where Eiffel pulled her with her sweater, she joked that her boss had given her a hickey.
She wasn’t the only one who said they were grabbed or hit. Several others said Eiffel would pull workers sharply by the arm or neck into a bathroom or a storage room in order to berate them. “She will push them, grab them really hard, not in a nice way but really tough,” said one former worker. “When she was grabbing all the people like that, I will say, ‘Marie, stop, don’t do that.’” Said another, “I saw her put workers in the bathroom and yell like crazy and hit them many times.”
Plus she could just be mean and controlling. “She told me she wouldn’t hire me back if I didn’t lose ten pounds,” said one employee, who was 13 when he worked there. Another remembers her “throwing a tray on the ground and saying to a kid who was a little hefty, ‘Pick it up, you pig.’”
The lawsuit’s accusations of wage theft and withholding tips overlap with the stories of many of the former employees I spoke to. “She won’t give like 100 percent; she will keep tips,” said one. Workers said that Marie withheld tips from some summer workers until the end of the season, when she would hand them out as a lump sum. Which really means that “everyone is terrified that if they quit, they won’t get tips,” a recent employee said. After he threatened to quit, a manager passed along a warning about how Eiffel would likely respond: If he did so, he would not receive the roughly $3,000 in tips he was owed. “I essentially was forced to work for a woman that I often did not respect or want to work for.”
The former workers say Eiffel also withheld wages as a punishment. “If I showed up late, she would not let me clock in,” Mamytova said. Eiffel would insist she work for free until some time had elapsed—as long as half an hour. Another former employee described an incident where Jason Penney, Eiffel’s boyfriend, “locked many workers in the market and forced them to work off the clock for an hour or something like that because we didn’t close fast enough.” (Penney declined a request for comment.) The worker who was at the store as a 13-year-old said he worked 48 hours a week and did not receive overtime. Another said that Marie would threaten to pay her workers less than they were owed if she felt they hadn’t worked hard enough that day.
Now that the lawsuit is public, lots of other kids who worked for Eiffel over the years are reevaluating their own experiences in the market — several ex-employees I talked to said they have reached out to the lawyers representing the plaintiffs to see if they can help. Others on the island — the summer crowd, mostly — are protesting that her employees just don’t get it. Says Araud, the retired French ambassador: “We have different sense of humor in France. And very often, there are things that doesn’t fly in America, some of our jokes.” Another summer visitor, reflecting on the lawsuit, wondered if accusations might have been blown out of proportion by employees who just didn’t like being yelled at. The store never seemed to have a “sinister vibe. It’s more like an eccentric, creative vibe,” he said. “She may be a bit polarizing, but I think, ultimately, there’s a lot of love for her. Marie will prevail, even if she has to rise again in a new form, is the sentiment.”
For her part, Marie seems to be directing blame elsewhere — she told the Reporter that she believed the suit was the result of her interaction with a “troubled young man,” while, according to the local rumor mill, she told friends at a recent party that she believed the owner of Pure Soul, a boutique across the street from her market, might be involved in the lawsuit in some way. (Pure Soul did not respond to requests for comment.) Through a lawyer, Marie declined to comment on the particulars of a detailed list of claims made in this article. “She rejects the allegations and claims contained in your email as well as how they depict her and her businesses,” her lawyer wrote. “The points you have identified are wrong, false, or inaccurate.” She did, however, share a few screenshots of positive messages sent by workers from this summer. “At the market, everyone is really welcome me,” read a text from a former employee named Siri. “I feel really appreciated. Marie always give us me some snacks and foods to try. Also she always gave me some hug and kiss which is really lovely. I can feel the love and warmth from her.”
