James Beard award-winning chef Ashley Christensen said she is taking accountability following accusations from a former employee that she was sexually assaulted in June of 2017 by fellow employees.

“I was sexually assaulted three times within my seven months of employment at Poole’s Diner,” Kaylin Fulp said at a meeting Sunday of the Raleigh chapter of the North Carolina Safety Alliance.

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The meeting, which was live streamed on the organization’s Instagram page, allowed victims of sexual assault and business owners to connect to discuss the #MeToo era and what next steps the hospitality industry specifically should be taking to ensure a safe working environment.

Fulp said she was 19 years old when she started working at Poole’s.

“I dropped out of culinary school because, like most of you in this industry, I couldn’t afford it,” Fulp said. “I went and got a job at what I thought would be a really nice replacement for classical training.”

Fulp said she told her boss about the alleged assaults but said nothing was done.

“Then you go and tell your boss who was supposed to care about you and they don’t do anything,” Fulp said.

Fulp posted about the allegations on her personal Instagram page Sunday night.

WRAL News reached out to Fulp after watching her video, but she declined an interview.

Christensen and wife Kait Goalen, in an open letter on the AC Restaurants websiteon Tuesday, wrote that while they did not have knowledge of the alleged assaults, they believe Fulp and “she is right to hold us accountable.”

The two wrote that they were aware of Fulp’s concerns about “instances of sexual harassment among kitchen employees at Poole’s through the use of vulgar language.

“Many of the details she shared about her experience this week are new information to us. We are trying to piece together the information that has been shared this week and the concerns that she shared with our HR director and manager in June of 2017, while she was employed at Poole’s Diner,” they wrote.

“We were not informed about any instances of sexual assault. Even now, we do not know the details of the assaults she has mentioned, including who perpetrated them. As more details about these experiences come to light, we are committed to investigating them and providing further follow up.”

“We know that ‘we didn’t know’ is not an excuse. We know that ‘we’re sorry’ is too little and too late,” the letter reads. “In fact, the very reality that this was a surprise to us underscores the failings of the policies and practices we had at the time. The weight of disclosure for survivors is heavy enough, and we understand now that we put too much burden on Kaylin to point out what we should’ve known and acted on with more specific force.”

The two added that they were “gutted to know of the hurt that she (Fulp) has experienced” and have asked for the opportunity to apologize to her directly “for the harm that we caused her.”

“Many of the details she shared about her experience this week are new information to us. We are trying to piece together the information that has been shared this week and the concerns that she shared with our HR director and manager in June of 2017, while she was employed at Poole’s Diner.”

Christensen and Goalen wrote that they “took action then based on the information we had at the time” and that they thought Fulp “felt supported and was satisfied with how her concerns were handled.”

Following Fulp’s comments on Sunday, Christensen and Goalen acknowledged that “our actions did not go far enough as a response to sexual assault, bullying and retaliation.”

Christensen and Goalen said that “the information shared with the four people involved (directly with a manager and HR director, and via written documentation of those meetings to Kaitlyn and Ashley), assault or any kind of physical touching was not mentioned. Bullying or retaliation was not mentioned.”

Christensen and Goalen said that if they had known about those claims, the perpetrators would have been terminated.

Since Fulp left the company, Christensen and Goalen said they have made changes to create "checks and balances that help us address the overall cultural weaknesses that existed previously."

The open letter lists several changes AC Restaurants have made since 2017 to improve employee culture. Among those listed is eliminating post-shift free alcoholic beverages for employees from all of their restaurants and creating a policy that a supervisor is not permitted to be in a sexual relationship with a subordinate.

The two said that in response to Fulp's allegations they have immediately changed the reporting procedure for employees.

"To bolster our existing reporting protocols, we have been talking with a local sexual trauma resource organization and intend to train our teams that they can reach out to this organization as an additional path for disclosing a workplace incident of harassment or assault, if for any reason an employee doesn’t feel comfortable doing so through our internal issue resolution procedure," they wrote.

Christensen spoke out in June about her own sexual abuse following accusations from 14 former employees at Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda.

In a series of Tweets addressing the issue, Christensen revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by an authority figure.​