Former Medieval Times performers say the dinner-theater chain fostered a toxic “knights will be knights” culture where sexual harassment, hazing, and animal abuse went unchecked across multiple castles.
The allegations span the company’s 10 North American locations, which draw roughly 2.5 million guests annually to their jousting tournaments and medieval feasts. Workers at castles in New Jersey, California, Arizona, and elsewhere described a fraternity-like environment where misconduct was dismissed as inevitable among the all-male knight corps.
Sean Quigley, an ex-lord chancellor at the Lyndhurst, New Jersey, castle, shared a locker room with the knight performers and said the behavior was brazen and routine. “They would pull down their pants and wait for someone to come around the corner,” he told Vanity Fair. Quigley added there was a “knights will be knights” attitude that normalized the conduct.
Purnell Thompson, who spent years in the Lyndhurst stables, said the culture extended beyond the locker room. “There’s like a whole pseudo-fraternity thing going on,” he said in the same report. A former Scottsdale, Arizona, castle employee told the outlet he was forced to run in the sand until he vomited during his first two weeks as a new hire.
Female workers said the macho environment targeted them relentlessly. Lexi-Lynn Taylor, a onetime queen at the Buena Park, California, castle, said many knights harassed and inappropriately touched her. She singled out one performer who “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
The castle also became a volatile scene for romantic entanglements among coworkers. “Everybody dated everybody,” said former queen Kate Farrell. “Things can get messy.” After Taylor shared a kiss with a knight at a Christmas party, she was slut-shamed and called a “knight’s mattress” and “ye old whore,” she claimed.
Farrell, who sued Medieval Times this year over allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation and gender discrimination, described another assault. “Another knight pushed me up against my car and pressed his hand on my crotch,” she said.
Managers allegedly enabled the harassment rather than stopping it. After one female worker reported misconduct, a manager had a subordinate remove stitching from her costumes to create “wardrobe malfunctions in front of live audiences,” according to the report. A former Scottsdale employee said he corroborated a female coworker’s harassment complaint in 2020, but the accused knight was simply relocated to another department with a pay increase. “On multiple occasions, I watched instances of poor behavior almost be rewarded,” the ex-employee said.
The horse stables presented their own crisis, former workers said. Sidney Setzer, an ex-stable hand, claimed “the horses would come back with visible raised welts on their hindquarters from whipping.” Setzer quit over physical exhaustion. Bethany Regan, another former cast member, alleged in a 2019 lawsuit that a trainer whipped horses unnecessarily, causing injuries and contributing directly to one horse’s death. That case settled out of court in 2020.
Erin Zapcic, a former queen at Buena Park, said the mistreatment of staff and animals drove her to act. “I loved my job. But I couldn’t stand by while they mistreated us and the animals,” she said.
Tensions erupted into open labor conflict in 2022 as workers at Buena Park and Lyndhurst organized unions and joined the American Guild of Variety Artists. The Buena Park employees launched a nine-month strike in February 2023, with the company flying in replacement performers from other castles. “Every single day for nine months, thousands of people crossed our picket line and called us assholes in the name of a two-hour show,” Zapcic said.
The strikers returned in November 2023, but Zapcic said the retaliation continued. “The amount we were relentlessly harassed and retaliated against by our coworkers was awful,” she said. The Buena Park union never secured a contract, and AGVA reportedly withdrew from the effort in 2024. A National Labor Relations Board judge ruled the following year that Medieval Times violated federal labor law in its anti-union campaign; the company has appealed.
Medieval Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.