A jury Wednesday found in favor of the city of Los Angeles in the trial of a whistleblower lawsuit in which a city auditor contended she was bypassed for special investigator positions in a backlash for reporting what she believed was unlawful activity.<\/p>\n
Plaintiff Soledad Gomez maintained she discovered the alleged wrongdoing during her 2019 temporary appointment as a special investigator in the City Controller\u2019s Office. But the Los Angeles Superior Court panel found that Gomez\u2019s disclosure of what she believed was unlawful activity was not a contributing factor to her not being given a permanent civil service position.<\/p>\n
Attorneys for the city stated in their court papers that Gomez performed \u201croutine investigative work\u201d and that the Controller\u2019s Office, Ethics Commission and City Attorney\u2019s Office all had legitimate, non-retaliatory reasons for selecting candidates other than the plaintiff for the positions for which she applied.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if plaintiff could establish protected activity, she presented no substantial evidence that the City\u2019s Controller\u2019s Office declined to offer her a permanent position because of it,\u201d the city\u2019s lawyers contended. \u201cTo the contrary, the evidence showed that the city itself authorized referral of her findings from her investigation of (the) DWP to the FBI, undermining any inference of retaliatory animus.\u201d<\/p>\n
The case was cleared for trial in March when Judge Dean J. Kitchens denied the city\u2019s motion to dismiss Gomez\u2019s single claim for whistleblower retaliation. The judge wrote that the city had not shown by \u201cclear and convincing evidence that (Gomez) would have not been hired for other legitimate reasons with respect to every adverse action taken against her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also in March, Gomez\u2019s fellow litigant, Beth Kennedy, an auditor for the City Controller\u2019s Office, reached a tentative settlement in her part of the case. She alleged her supervisor discouraged her from closely examining some Department of Water and Power contracts, including one that was part of an FBI investigation. No terms were divulged.<\/p>\n
According to Kennedy\u2019s claims, she began working as an auditor well over two decades ago. She contended that a supervisor told her in 2019 that a recent DWP whistleblower had recently died on the job and that it was \u201cbasically murder.\u201d<\/p>\n
The boss then told Kennedy to be careful with her audit by not asking a lot of questions and to avoid \u201cdigging too deep.\u201d Kennedy told the boss that they should report the information to the FBI, but he said that was not necessary, according to the suit.<\/p>\n
Kennedy also contended that there was a break-in at her La Habra home in June 2019, hours after she and her staff had questioned DWP managers about the handling of some of its contracts. Kennedy was on the phone with her ex-husband at the time and screamed at him to call 911, then she barricaded herself and waited for police to arrive, the suit states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A jury Wednesday found in favor of the city of Los Angeles in the trial of a whistleblower…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":632582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[329983,1582,276,2451,13155,2961,379,224,5337,19830,102364],"class_list":["post-812109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-auditors","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-city","tag-jury","tag-la","tag-lawsuit","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-rejects","tag-whistleblower"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116612381411767210","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}