This Bad Boss Kept a Diver Out of the Water and Blamed Her for Abuse She Faced
Ariel Schlosser was the only woman diver hired on an important job by VRHabilis, a company that specializes in handling underwater explosives.
VRH rarely allowed her in the water.
Before Schlosser started work on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, in an area that was once used for military target practice, Ron Madden, her manager on the project, had discussed how working with women is “nothing but trouble,” according to a witness in a lawsuit later filed by Schlosser.
And after the job began, Madden broke from industry practice to ban Schlosser from diving for extended periods, disproportionately giving her lesser-paid surface tasks, according to testimony.
Madden even texted HR about buying Schlosser a plane ticket so he could “get her stuff and get her off the island,” the court heard at trial, though Madden told jurors he was just “venting” after a few drinks.
In addition to being kept out of the water, Schlosser testified, she faced verbal abuse from a team leader and her peers, with whom she shared a rental house — yet Madden laid the blame for some conflict on Schlosser, saying that she “drank heavily … and lashed out.”
Frustrated, Schlosser finally felt compelled to quit.
Ron Madden is our latest Bad Boss of the Month.
Schlosser sued VRH in federal court, claiming discrimination and retaliation based on her sex. In 2023, a jury in Knoxville, Tenn., VRH’s home base, found that Schlosser had faced a hostile work environment and awarded her almost $60,000 in back pay.
The verdict was affirmed by an appeals court, and the case ended late last year with a settlement on attorney fees.
Schlosser was used to being the only woman in a group of male divers, she testified. Already an experienced recreational diver, she started her commercial training in Jacksonville, Fla., where just one other woman signed up for her cohort — and didn’t last, leaving Schlosser as the only woman to be certified.
She dove on a wide variety of jobs, starting in Hawaii and bouncing around the country on assignments ranging from ship and dam inspections to pipe and water-tower maintenance. Then she heard from a friend about diving for UXO — unexploded ordnance.
UXO diving is about the safe disposal of underwater explosive material, often bombs or artillery shells on military firing ranges. It’s a delicate and risky job, but her friend told her she’d make “a lot more money,” she testified.
“I said, ‘Sign me up,'” she told jurors.
At UXO school, Schlosser was again the only woman in her cohort. She liked the new discipline, however, and enjoyed several UXO jobs — including cleaning up rocket debris in Alaska — where men typically made up about 90% of the divers, she testified.
Ultimately, she applied to VRH on the recommendation of a colleague who was friendly with Ron Madden, her eventual boss. A former classmate at the company also vouched for Schlosser but warned her that VRH was leery of “hiring a female,” according to court documents.
Schlosser was offered a job that called for her to perform three roles: diver; standby diver; and tender, an on-the-surface assistant. In May 2016, she arrived at Cape Poge on Chappaquiddick Island for the project, a cleanup of World War II-era practice bombs.
Schlosser quickly ran into differential treatment, she testified: While her male colleagues unloaded a truck, a VRH manager pulled her aside to test her knot-tying skills, which he then ordered her to practice.
“It made me feel uncomfortable, singled out,” she told jurors. “And the communication wasn’t there … so to everybody else it looks like I’m just standing around” instead of pitching in.
Indeed, Madden witnessed the scene and later chastised Schlosser for “not helping the team,” he testified.
In another early incident, Schlosser had to resurface on her first dive in order to add weight to her VRH-issued belt. Madden testified that the minor glitch was deemed a black mark against Schlosser, even though jurors heard that a far more experienced male diver had made the same miscalculation without penalty.
After less than a week of work, Madden and another VRH executive relied on such black marks to relegate Schlosser to surface duty, jurors heard. The only other diver who was banned from diving, according to a witness, had failed a physical.
Commercial divers typically rotate between their three duties. Active diving pays the highest per-hour rate; standby duty pays less; and tender/surface tasks pay the least, according to testimony. By keeping Schlosser on the surface, VRH was effectively lowering her pay.
Even more frustrating: Schlosser was never told of the ban, she testified, so she kept asking to dive — so much that her team leader, under orders to stymie her, began to denigrate and curse at her.
Oblivious, Schlosser reported the insults to VRH’s HR department. Meanwhile, the team leader asked for Schlosser to be taken off his hands. Schlosser thought that her resulting transfer to another dive crew was a positive act by VRH, she testified, but she later realized it was in response to the abusive leader’s plea.
In any case, Schlosser’s new crew didn’t enforce the diving ban — and Schlosser went on to “objectively outperform … several of her [new] teammates,” in the words of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. But even in her new team, she faced open hostility from a peer, which she testified went unchecked by her new leader.
After VRH managers learned that Schlosser was still diving, Madden sent an email to renew his ban, according to court records.
“I don’t want her diving for at least the next two weeks,” the email said.
“No fair rotation system should be in play,” Madden decreed. “The highest performers will be the divers.”
Despite no longer overseeing her work, Schlosser’s former team leader chimed in to say that Schlosser was “indisputably the least talented,” according to records — and Madden’s response seemed exultant:
“Bam. Perfect! This is what I needed to hear/see.”
Except it wasn’t true: At trial, Madden conceded that Schlosser wasn’t the worst diver numbers-wise — and that a less productive male diver was never banned from diving, even after Madden’s email.
Blocked again from the water, and facing continued harassment from her hostile teammate, Schlosser felt she had no choice except to quit, she testified.
“My gender now feels, in itself, derogatory,” she said in her resignation email.
Schlosser worked other UXO jobs until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down her job site. Pregnant with her first child, she decided to go back to school. At the time of the trial, Schlosser was still working in UXO. She had two kids, two associates degrees, and was headed to study at Virginia Tech, where she subsequently appeared on several Dean’s Lists.
» Read Schlosser’s complaint
» Read a declaration from Schlosser’s former dive supervisor
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Schlosser v. VRHabilis, LLC. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Schlosser was represented by attorneys from the Employment and Commerce Law Group.
This Bad Boss Claimed That His Elected Position Made Him Unaccountable for His Sexual Behavior
By the time Amy Ogle was hired in 2016 as a deputy court clerk in Anderson County, Tenn., her new boss already had been accused of sexual harassment — and already had claimed that he was above discipline, according to later court testimony.
As an elected official, County Clerk William Jones boasted, “I could sit in my office butt-naked with the door open and masturbate, and there is not a thing you can do about it,” he told the county’s then-HR director, the HR official testified at a trial.
Yet Anderson County kept on hiring women to work for Jones — which is how Ogle ended up receiving unwelcome “booby hugs” and a flood of lewd comments, propositions, and partially nude photos from her boss, often via the Snapchat app that he had personally installed on her phone, she testified.
When she resisted his advances, Ogle told jurors, Jones reassigned her to an outlying office and told her she’d be stuck there “until [she] got out of [her] shyness.”
Later, as she tried to return to work from a prolonged medical leave, Jones met her in an Arby’s parking lot and pressed her to sign a statement that he’d never harassed her, she testified.
She declined.
Williams Jones is our Bad Boss of the Month.
Ogle filed a lawsuit against the county and against Jones personally. In July 2024, a federal jury awarded her almost $6 million in damages, of which $4 million was against Jones as an individual. The parties settled her claims during mediation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the case was finally dismissed last month.
Ogle was born and raised in Anderson County, which is north of Knoxville and home to the Museum of Appalachia. Before taking a job with Jones in late 2016, she had been a stay-at-home mom for about 11 years — but at age 35 with two daughters and a faltering marriage, Ogle testified, she decided to “start trying to make [her] own money.”
Her first desk was behind a half-wall, and she testified at trial that her new boss would pull up to her on a rolling chair and rub her upper thigh. Jones did the same to other women he employed, a former co-worker told jurors, leading the women to hide his rolling chair so Jones couldn’t use it.
But the chair reappeared the next day, the co-worker testified, with “a sign on it to the effect that, if the chair is moved again, you’ll be fired.”
Jones had been elected to a four-year term as county clerk and took office in the second half of 2014. Quickly thereafter he was reported to Anderson County’s HR department for inappropriate behavior — including one incident in which he insisted on watching a female employee eat yogurt, which he said was a fetish of his — and the county had transferred at least one complaining worker out of his department, according to court documents.
Still, the county took no disciplinary action against Jones and its mayor said she didn’t want to start a legal proceeding — an “ouster suit” would be the only way to remove the clerk from office, jurors heard — because she feared a “political storm,” the county’s former HR director said in court.
“That’s just the way it is in local government,” the mayor told the HR official, according to testimony.
And so Ogle arrived in an office where her elected boss called himself “daddy” and insisted that female employees give him “booby hugs,” where he would press his chest against their breasts, Ogle testified.
Jones had told several of his female employees to download the Snapchat app to their phones — and he installed it on Ogle’s phone himself, she testified, using it to send her unwelcome texts, photos, and propositions.
Unlike many other apps, Snapchat doesn’t leave much of an electronic trail: Messages get deleted automatically, and senders are notified if a recipient tries to save anything.
“There was some pretty vulgar things that he would send, and I would try to save them,” she told jurors. “He would tell me … ‘You need to delete it now, or else you’re fired.'”
Ogle was afraid to complain, she testified, because she needed to stay employed. By February 2017 her marriage was headed toward divorce; she and her children were sleeping on an air mattress in a friend’s living room.
“I was the only income coming in at this point for my two kids,” she said at trial.
In March 2017, Jones gave Ogle a new job with a private office — and he quickly became a regular visitor.
“He would come in with porn … and shut the door and show [it] to me,” Ogle testified. “And then he would sit back and laugh. And then he would make sure to tell me that he was an elected official, that no one could touch him.”
At one point, Ogle testified, she thought she was alone and went under her desk to adjust her computer wiring. When she emerged, she said, Jones was sitting in a chair with his legs spread. “Your head looks good right there,” she told jurors that he said, “but it would look even better if it was on this” — indicating his crotch.
“I was scared,” Ogle testified. “I forced my way out around him … jumped up, and [ran] out. … I was crying uncontrollabl[y].”
Later that same day, Ogle said in court documents, Jones asked her to meet him at a nearby Git’N Go gas station. In court, she testified that Jones said he wanted “sex or oral sex.”
It wasn’t the only time Jones suggested meeting at the Git’N Go or elsewhere, according to testimony. Each time, Ogle deflected: She had to meet her children after work. Once, worried that Jones would shadow her, Ogle asked her parents — who were babysitting — to bring her girls to the office parking lot, jurors heard.
Other employees got similar propositions, according to testimony, including proposed visits to a nearby tanning salon owned by Jones’ wife, whom he called “mama.” A former intern told jurors that Jones asked her to join him and “mama” in a threesome.
In court documents, Jones denied any harassment or wrongdoing.
The Snapchat messages became more frequent, Ogle told the court. One evening, while she was on an out-of-town trip with her daughters, Jones gave her an ultimatum to send him a “booby picture” or else report to work at 8:00am the next morning, on pain of firing — even though he had already approved her vacation time, she testified.
Intimidated, she sent him a bathing suit photo. A few weeks later, she said in court documents, she finally deleted Snapchat from her phone and told Jones she wouldn’t meet him outside work. Jones promptly moved her to the clerk’s Oak Ridge office — known among employees as the “graveyard” — and told her she’d get no more raises, Ogle testified.
“He kept telling me that until I got out of my shyness, I was going to stay there,” Ogle told jurors.
Ogle and her co-workers had few routes to complain about Jones. According to testimony, the clerk had opted his entire office out of Anderson County’s anti-harassment policies, calling them “bullshit,” and instead channeled most complaints to him or his chief deputy.
Eventually Ogle went on medical leave due to the onset of Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear condition sometimes caused by stress and fatigue. She did extensive physical therapy to combat her symptoms, which included dizziness and blacking out, but her leave expired before her doctor cleared her to return to work — meaning that Jones could now decide whether she’d be reinstated, she testified.
By this time, Jones’s behavior toward female employees had burst into public view — including in a lawsuit filed by the former intern who claimed he had propositioned her for a threesome. The clerk had been condemned by the county commission and faced a challenge for reelection.
Still on leave but anxious to restart work, Ogle was surprised when Jones called her and asked to meet in the parking lot of the local Arby’s. Unable to drive because of her medical condition, she asked her new partner to bring her, she testified. Jones was waiting in a car with his wife, she told jurors; amid a downpour, she scooted between vehicles and sat in Jones’ back seat as he requested a written statement saying that he had never sexually harassed her.
Ogle interpreted it as a quid pro quo for her reinstatement, she testified, although Jones claimed in court documents that he “unconditionally” approved her return to work.
“I told him that I would sign,” she told jurors, “because I was in fear, once again, terrified of losing my job.”
As soon as she left Jones’ car, however, she changed her mind. Instead, she contacted Anderson County’s HR department, with whom she had organized her medical leave, according to testimony. She returned to work in a different department, away from Jones — and within a few months, Jones was gone, having been defeated at the polls.
Ogle continued to work for Anderson County for another year, but she suffered lasting effects from her stint with Jones. The partner who had driven her to Arby’s, and whom she married in 2020, told jurors that she remains uncomfortable around male supervisors and “goes into complete panic mode” whenever she runs into Jones in the community.
“She’s trying to get out of the building,” he testified. “She’s, like, ‘We got to get out of here! We got to get out of here!’“
Last year, jurors awarded Ogle almost $6 million in damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Tennessee Human Rights Act, an amount that the trial judge reduced slightly due to a legal cap. Jones was ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.
Section 1983 provides a federal cause of action against state or local officials who deprive people of constitutional rights. It allows bad actors to be sued individually — although they are generally indemnified by their employer if they act within the scope of their employment.
The terms of the subsequent settlement at the Sixth Circuit weren’t revealed.
At the time of the trial, Amy Ogle (now Amy Carr) had started working for the sheriff’s department in neighboring Union County, in a role she may have found familiar from her days with Jones.
“My title is animal control,” she testified.
» Read Ogle’s complaint
» Read the complaint filed by Ogle’s co-worker
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Ogle v. Jones. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Ogle was represented by attorneys from Collins Law PLC, Knoxville Attorney PLLC, and the Law Office of Ursula Bailey.
This Bad Boss Failed to Act While a Disabled Employee Lost the Simple Tools Needed to Do His Job
After a 2014 medical accident left him a paraplegic, Daniel Callahan struggled hard to regain limited use of his legs.
When he succeeded, he needed just a few more things to resume his long career as a concierge at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, he testified later in court: A decent desk and chair, for instance; a good padded mat so he could stand without much pain; and a break room that wasn’t too far from his work station.
And at first, Callahan told a San Francisco jury, he got most of those things.
But then the hotel started chipping away at his accommodations — and his manager, Scott Garlow, was “contemptuous” in the face of the concierge’s rising dismay, Callahan said in a legal complaint.
Manager Garlow told Callahan that he couldn’t stow his mobility scooter by the concierge desk, for example, forcing him to walk farther — and Garlow agreed that Callahan should stop eating lunch in a nearby storage room when HR accused the longtime employee of being a “security risk” for guests’ luggage, according to testimony.
Meanwhile Garlow gossiped publicly with staff about Callahan’s bodily functions, the concierge told jurors, and he made light of Callahan’s difficulty navigating his workspace.
Finally, during renovations, the hotel replaced Callahan’s desk and chair. No one consulted the disabled concierge and the new furniture made sitting far harder for Callahan, who by then had been diagnosed with a heart condition, jurors heard.
In September 2019, with the ill-suited desk still in place despite repeated pleas to Garlow and others, Callahan’s doctor advised him to stop working at the Marriott — and in a later deposition, testified that the hotel’s lack of accommodation had likely contributed to the concierge’s health crisis.
Scott Garlow is our Bad Boss of the Month.
After quitting, Callahan filed a complaint against the Marriott Marquis, claiming discrimination and a failure to follow the proper accommodation process. A state jury found in his favor last fall and awarded Callahan an eye-opening $20 million in damages; since then the case docket has shown no further litigation.
Manager Garlow never explained himself at the trial; Marriott declined to call him as a witness, and Callahan’s attorneys couldn’t locate him to demand his testimony.
Callahan’s hospitality career had launched along with the Marriott Marquis itself: As a fresh arrival in San Francisco, he had recently enrolled in a hotel management program when a Marriott representative showed up in 1989 to recruit staff for the newly constructed building on Mission Street, which boasted high-end amenities and sweeping views.
Callahan was hired as a banquet server even before the hotel’s official opening. Soon afterward, a spot opened up in the concierge department, which helps guests with advice, local reservations, and special arrangements.
“Right from the get-go, it was the perfect fit for me,” Callahan told the jury. “I felt like I had found a home.”
Callahan loved interacting with guests, he testified: He even spent his personal days helping Marriott to invent new services that could be offered to VIPs, which allowed the concierge department to be profitable for the first time.
He was nominated for multiple awards; served as a board member of the Northern California Concierge Association; and was accepted into Les Clefs d’Or — an international association he told the court is “the pinnacle of being a concierge.”
Throughout all of this, however, Callahan suffered from chronic back pain. He had surgery and later began to get regular epidural injections to manage the problem — until early 2014, when an injection went wrong and injured his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down.
“I woke up as a paraplegic,” Callahan told the jury.
Callahan immediately set a goal, he testified: To regain enough mobility to return to work at the Marriott within a year. His doctors were skeptical, he said, and his young daughter — whom he used to take skiing and boogie boarding — compared him to a monster as he struggled to walk using leg braces and a walker.
The injury’s impact, he testified, had changed his life “like throwing a light switch, and my daughter was scared. I was scared. And that’s another reason it was just so important for me … not to give up. [T]hat’s something I wanted to make sure I showed to her.”
Callahan drew on his grit and returned to the hotel on schedule in January 2015. He doesn’t recall much about his first day back, but he strongly remembers arriving home in his Marriott uniform, just like he used to, and being greeted by his smiling daughter.
“She now had some hope,” he told jurors. “And so did I.”
Callahan had returned to the Marriott with a doctor’s note that explained his needs, most of which were easily met, he said in court.
The existing concierge desk and floor mat were adequate, he testified, and he could eat his lunch in a room behind the nearby bell desk. Though he had previously stood up to interact with most guests, he now needed to sit down more. It was painful and difficult to walk for any distance, and he needed a cane to do so.
Callahan’s electric mobility scooter, which allowed him to travel farther and faster, was a sticking point. Although there was a suitable space available beside the concierge desk, he testified, boss Garlow insisted that the scooter be parked in a storage area — “and that really defeat[ed] the purpose.” He opted not to use it.
Further problems arose. The room behind the bell desk, where Callahan had started eating his lunch, was often locked. At other times, there wasn’t any chair available in the room, or the chairs were stored away on shelves. Callahan wanted Marriott to designate at least one seat there for disabled employees — like Starbucks does for customers, he noted — and he would have liked a key to the room, but Garlow never offered a permanent solution, he testified.
Frustrated, Callahan suggested using a room that was farther away, a storage area for luggage that the bellmen also used for breaks. Walking to that room felt like “a marathon,” Callahan told the jury, but at least there was usually a chair available. Garlow initially agreed but later backtracked, Callahan testified, seeming to agree with an HR official who said that the concierge — by then a Marriott employee for more than a quarter-century — shouldn’t be trusted with guests’ belongings.
Callahan rebelled, continuing to use the room, and the dispute caused a string of tense meetings with Garlow and HR.
Other necessities started to disappear. The large padded mat at the concierge desk was thrown out, forcing Callahan to stand painfully on hard tile for months, despite complaints to Garlow, jurors heard. When some smaller mats finally arrived, Callahan lacked the core strength to wheel his chair across them, and the chair itself often sat at an angle. Callahan ended up standing more, and had to ice his feet at home afterward, he testified.
When Callahan complained to Garlow that the mats’ edges were curling — yet another hazard — the manager forcibly shoved the concierge onto a mat and laughed, Callahan told the court. “The mats are not that terrible,” Garlow told his disabled employee, according to Callahan.
There were other humiliations. A coworker laughed mockingly at Callahan when the concierge nearly lost his balance; Garlow was standing nearby and said nothing, Callahan testified. On a separate occasion, Garlow and an HR employee speculated aloud, within earshot of Callahan, about the concierge’s ability to urinate and have bowel movements, according to Callahan.
By Thanksgiving 2017, Callahan was so stressed that he spent most of the holiday in bed, unable to sleep and struggling to breathe easily. A few days later he went to the emergency room and was admitted to hospital.
“I learned that I was in the first stages of heart failure,” he testified.
Callahan took a leave of absence, but things were no better when he returned. Within a few months, the hotel began renovations — and the concierge station was temporarily moved up a floor, far from the room Callahan had previously used for lunch.
A break room on the temporary floor was very difficult to reach, Callahan testified, but Garlow’s only suggestion was to use the staff cafeteria three floors away. Callahan emailed both HR and hotel management multiple times, according to court documents, to no avail.
Even after it was finished, the renovation was a disaster for Callahan. A new concierge desk was so wide that he couldn’t reach across it, he testified — and it didn’t offer enough leg space for him to sit properly. The new chair, meanwhile, angled him forward, putting more weight on his weakened legs.
“Working at that workstation was like torture,” Callahan said at trial. “My coworker at one point said to me, ‘My back is really jacked up from this desk. I can’t imagine what’s happening to yours.'”
Callahan complained repeatedly to Garlow and emailed HR to ask about his needs; in response, he told jurors, HR replied that “no special accommodations” had been made for the disabled concierge — either at the desk or anywhere else in the hotel.
In September 2019, Callahan’s doctor told him he had to quit. The concierge’s work situation was aggravating his heart condition, the doctor later testified.
Reluctantly, Callahan complied. “I loved this job,” he said at trial. “The only time I felt like I wasn’t disabled was when I was working with guests.”
In its verdict, the jury found that at least one Marriott executive was “guilty of malice, fraud, or oppression” in the hotel’s illegal treatment of Callahan. Jurors awarded the concierge $5 million for his pain and suffering, past and future — and added a further $15 million to punish Marriott.
Callahan’s heart condition had worsened in the meantime, leading to surgery and an implanted device. Shortly before the trial, he told jurors, his doctors had informed him that he needed “another heart.”
He was just about to get on a transplant list, he testified.
» Read Callahan’s complaint
» Read an excerpt of Callahan’s trial testimony
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Callahan v. Marriott Marquis Hotel. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Daniel Callahan was represented by the Law Offices of Susan Rubenstein; the deRubertis Law Firm; and the Law Offices of Patrice L. Goldman.
These Bad Bosses Passed Over a Star Employee in Favor of “Young and Perky”
Kelly O’Kell was in her mid-fifties when her new boss, Clinton Wertz, stood in her office and told her he’d never hire a woman her age, according to court testimony.
Along with his deputy, Clyde Lay, Wertz pushed managers to favor “young and new” people at the Ephrata, Wash. field office of the U.S. Department of the Interior, according to a complaint filed later by O’Kell — a pattern of favoritism that was confirmed by the judge in the case.
When O’Kell applied for a promotion for which she’d been told she was the only viable in-house contender, Wertz passed her over in favor of an outsider who had never worked for the federal government. Wertz’s purported reason, as O’Kell testified she heard via a colleague: The other candidate — a slender, blonde woman under 40 — was “young and perky.”
Wertz and Lay brushed off O’Kell when she asked about the decision, she testified, so she contacted an Equal Employment Opportunity counselor. As soon as her bosses heard about her EEO complaint they began to treat her differently, the judge found: They disciplined O’Kell for how she was expressing her frustration, he said, even as her substantive complaints “fell into a black hole.”
“Clint and Clyde are coming after you,” O’Kell’s direct manager warned her as he meted out punishment that came from above, she testified.
O’Kell’s pushback was framed as creating a hostile work environment, and ultimately she was fired for rudeness, among other offenses. She hasn’t found comparable work since.
Clinton Wertz and Clyde Lay are our Bad Bosses of the Month.
O’Kell filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department, claiming age discrimination and retaliation. A federal judge ruled in her favor after an 11-day bench trial, awarding her almost $1.7 million in damages and ordering the agency to remove all tainted discipline records from O’Kell’s personnel file.
An appeals court later told the judge to adjust his damages calculations; a revised judgment remains pending at this writing.
Government was O’Kell’s second career. Originally a trusts lawyer, she was self-employed before a series of accidents made it impossible to find her own health insurance, she told the judge. In 2008, she took a job with the Interior Department in Wyoming, moved to Oregon in 2011, and arrived in Ephrata in 2014. She worked there as a realty specialist, handling the federal government’s land sales, land purchases, and land access requests.
In 2015, Clinton Wertz was named as the Ephrata office’s field manager — and the atmosphere changed, O’Kell testified. Asked soon afterward by her direct manager, Anthony Ortiz, to help him vet a list of potential hires, she heard about a new directive.
“Tony told us … that Clint told him repeatedly we’re only to hire the young and new,” she testified. “One [person on the list], Tony told me … ‘She’s probably your age,’ so he scratched her off.”
Among the new hires chosen: A younger woman named Sarah Maciel who, when she started work at the Ephrata field office, repeatedly called O’Kell “grandma” despite being asked to stop, O’Kell testified.
Not long after Maciel’s arrival, according to O’Kell, Wertz came into to a room where both women worked and, holding forth, said he’d never hire a woman over 50 “because they can’t carry the workload like a man.” O’Kell was 56 at the time.
Just a few months later, Wertz would select Maciel — who was two grades below O’Kell on the government scale — for an interview panel that helped to evaluate her senior colleague for a promotion, a decision the judge drily called “unusual.”
Maciel’s participation wasn’t the only odd aspect of O’Kell’s promotion denial. Wertz had recently brought aboard Clyde Lay, with whom he’d previously worked, as his deputy. The two men consulted on hiring decisions, according to one witness, and “it always worked out … that the people they were hiring were the young girls, young ladies.”
Nonetheless, both Lay and Wertz told O’Kell that she was “the only person in the office” who was qualified for the new position, according to O’Kell’s complaint. So when O’Kell appeared before the interview panel, she testified, she was shocked that Wertz acted with obvious disinterest.
“He was kicked back in his chair with his foot up on his knee, and he was texting and laughing,” she told the judge. “He occasionally put his phone down when he asked me a question, but then, as soon as he was done with his note, he would pick his phone back up. And he really maybe looked at me twice through the whole interview, maybe three or four times. Not often. It was so minimal. It was so uncomfortable.”
Instead of O’Kell, Wertz chose to hire the other person who interviewed, a slim younger woman with no federal experience. Wertz told Lay to break the news via phone to O’Kell, who was at a training session in Idaho. At first she took the disappointment in stride, but then she went out to dinner at a Red Robin with a group of colleagues including Sarah Maciel — her junior, who had sat on her interview panel — and “asked her if there was anything I could have done different.”
According to O’Kell, Maciel was blunt about Wertz’s rationale: “All things being equal, the other candidate was young and perky and going to bring new energy to the office.”
“I went out behind the restaurant behind a dumpster because I wasn’t going to let them see me cry,” O’Kell told the judge. “And I cried behind the dumpster, and I stayed out there through their whole dinner. I went back in … and my dinner was sitting there, and I couldn’t eat. Sarah started talking about [how] the longer I worked there, the more I’ll understand management.”
Ironically, O’Kell would later receive a “STAR award” that honored her as “an example of knowledge, quality, and extra effort.” Wertz had signed it on May 19, 2016, the very same day O’Kell learned of her non-selection, the court heard.
The following week, O’Kell confronted Wertz and Lay separately but got nowhere. In court, Lay acknowledged that he’d understood O’Kell to be complaining about Wertz’s overt age bias — and that he responded by trying to end the discussion, saying that “I cannot imagine that Clint would ever say anything like that ever.”
“Clint wasn’t hiring all the young women,” Lay explained further to O’Kell, he testified: A female official was doing some of the hiring, too. Lay never reported the discussion to EEO officials, he told the judge, nor to anyone in human resources, nor even to Wertz. Instead, he “handed it off” to O’Kell’s direct manager, Lay’s subordinate, a man whom O’Kell testified was easily intimidated.
O’Kell contacted the agency’s EEO counselor herself. Her complaint was one of dozens made by Ephrata workers during this approximate period, the judge found — including several claims of age bias that were bolstered by quotes such as “we need young blood” and “older workers don’t go with the flow.”
Ephrata leaders learned within hours that O’Kell had filed a complaint, the judge said, and “immediately began to treat her differently.”
O’Kell’s direct boss, Ortiz, suspended her telework privileges and then issued her a letter of reprimand a few weeks later, supposedly for engaging in inappropriate conduct toward Maciel — an accusation that the judge said had credibility issues, and an outcome he found to be retaliatory.
Yet O’Kell gradually realized, she said in court, that Ortiz was just the messenger. “Please, this is not coming from me,” he’d say after returning from meetings with Wertz and Lay, she testified. “Don’t be mad at me.”
After she made a formal complaint of retaliation, Ortiz warned her that she was now firmly on Lay’s “hit list,” according to her complaint.
Long months of tension followed. The judge described this period as “an almost endless dispute.” O’Kell was investigated for supposed infractions, often for the tone of her responses to managers and co-workers, even as she brought more claims and her original complaint languished. Her manager Ortiz — whom she had come to see as a protector — died in an accident, and, even as grief counselors visited the office, she testified, Lay spoke ominously to her in the hallway.
“Now I finally got you where I want you,” she testified that he said.
To escape the Ephrata office, O’Kell applied for other jobs — but the reprimand in her file made it difficult. She asked Lay to remove it, but Lay testified that he replied that he’d do so only if she presented him with her signed acceptance of another job. The agency’s EEO specialist later said that Lay’s condition was “unacceptable” and evidence of retaliation, according to court documents.
A bit later that year, Lay issued O’Kell with a proposed three-day suspension — which was upheld by another manager — and gave O’Kell her first-ever poor performance rating.
In his letter proposing her suspension, Lay said he was disciplining O’Kell for “the continued inappropriate manner in which you choose to voice your [discrimination and retaliation] concerns. I am not prohibiting you from raising concerns. However, there are appropriate processes and forums to do so.”
The judge saw things differently, blaming the government itself for “abdicating [its] responsibilities” toward an employee in anguish. O’Kell’s “behavioral issues at work may have been born[] out of [her department’s] inaction” on her complaints, he found; her managers might have worked with their former star to “figure out and address the root cause of her behavior changes.”
O’Kell did use all the prescribed processes, the judge observed, but she got back nothing but frustration as her complaint went “uninvestigated and uncompleted.” He found her suspension to be rooted in retaliation.
Wertz’s role in the suspension is unclear, meanwhile, and he was about to leave the Ephrata office anyhow: According to Lay’s testimony, higher-ups felt that Wertz “wasn’t doing a good job.”
O’Kell was eventually fired in 2018, about two years after her original promotion denial. By that time the Interior Department still hadn’t issued any findings from its investigation of her first claim of discrimination, way back in 2016 — and it still hadn’t done so by the time the judge issued his findings in 2022.
By contrast, O’Kell’s firing was the result of a whirlwind investigation that started with Lay escorting her out of an employee luncheon to meet with a private investigator. It ended just two months later with a notice of proposed removal that cited multiple instances of O’Kell’s rudeness, unresponsiveness, lack of respect, and other “inappropriate conduct.”
But without the earlier retaliatory discipline, the judge found, O’Kell “would not have been terminated.” And the speedy investigation showed that the Interior Department was “fully capable” of completing an internal probe — it just “chose” not to do so for O’Kell’s allegations.
O’Kell filed her lawsuit about a month after her firing. A single mother of adult children, she had just made the final payment on a daughter’s student loan. She never had a chance, she testified, to start saving for her own retirement.
While waiting for the trial, O’Kell applied for about 100 jobs, she testified. She got just two offers — one of which was rescinded based on the government’s documentation of her termination. The other required a commute that she couldn’t handle for medical reasons.
By the time of the trial, which was delayed for COVID and other reasons, she was still unemployed. Lay, meanwhile, remained at the Ephrata field office.
» Read O’Kell’s complaint
» Read the judge’s findings
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in O’Kell v. Haaland. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Kelly O’Kell was represented by Riverside NW Law Group.
This Proselytizing Bad Boss Fired His Employee After She Asked Off for the Jewish Holidays
In 2016, attorney Kimberly Edelstein asked for time off to observe some of the most sacred days on the Jewish calendar.
“Holy cow!” exclaimed her Christian boss, Gregory Stephens, according to testimony in a case filed later by Edelstein. “Eight days?!”
Edelstein was terminated shortly afterward by Stephens, an Ohio state judge who was also a Baptist preacher and a door-to-door proselytizer. Stephens believes, he testified, that Jews and other people who don’t accept Jesus as their savior are destined for hell.
At trial, Stephens said that neither Edelstein’s religion nor her leave request (which he granted before firing her) was a factor in her termination. Instead, he told jurors, he was punishing poor work behavior by Edelstein that was largely reported by another employee — the judge’s now-deceased judicial assistant, who Edelstein testified had hissed at her as she gathered her belongings:
“Hey, Jew, get your stuff packed yet?”
The judge didn’t investigate these negative reports about Edelstein before firing her, he testified; he saw no reason to doubt his assistant’s motives.
Gregory Stephens is our latest Bad Boss of the Month.
Edelstein filed a lawsuit against Stephens in federal court, claiming religious discrimination and other wrongdoing. On February 3, 2023, after a nine-day trial at which Edelstein represented herself against her former boss — in part, she testified, because no local attorney wanted to sue a judge — a jury found that Stephens had violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the religious practice of government employees.
Jurors awarded Edelstein $1.12 million in damages; the case remains in post-trial motions.
Edelstein wasn’t raised Jewish, she testified, but she chose Judaism after taking a college class on world religions. She learned Hebrew and now prays in it; she later married an Orthodox Jewish man and still keeps a kosher house — two complete sets of dishes, for example, one for meat and one for dairy.
At trial, she educated the Cincinnati jury on the basics of her faith, which she described as “a life of ritual.” She evidently felt a need to dispel some offensive stereotypes: Orthodox Jews, she told jurors, “are incredibly generous. They are not at all stingy.”
The first member of her family to get a bachelor’s degree, Edelstein also earned a master’s degree and then — after her plan for a State Department career was derailed by a Clinton-era hiring freeze — a law degree, which she funded with scholarships, loans, and by working as a barista and at a Subway shop.
Around 2007, Edelstein was hired as a staff attorney and magistrate for Judge Patricia Oney of the Butler County Court of Common Pleas in Hamilton, Ohio, a city on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati. Her duties included drafting decisions for Oney; conducting status reports; and hearing certain types of cases, such as stalking protection orders.
Edelstein worked easily with her judge to accommodate the demands of her faith, she testified, including a period each fall during which she had to take off eight workdays, scattered across a few weeks that start with Rosh Hashanah.
By 2014, however, Judge Oney began having medical issues. Edelstein testified that she stepped up to help, handling Oney’s entire civil docket, including jury trials, until the judge’s sudden retirement at the end of 2015. What followed was a revolving cast of visiting judges, while Edelstein “prayed a lot” for a permanent replacement who would keep her on staff.
Finally, in March 2016, Greg Stephens arrived at the court after being appointed as Oney’s replacement by Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
“I was thrilled … that I was going to get a judge,” Edelstein told jurors. “And hopefully — hopefully — I could keep my job.”
Stephens had spent most of his career as a criminal prosecutor. He brought along two of his own staff: Melinda Barger as judicial assistant and Jamie Wilson as bailiff. None of the newcomers had much experience in civil cases, and Stephens opted to keep Edelstein in her role. Edelstein testified that she and the new judge agreed to give each other a three-month notice if things weren’t working out.
At first, the transition was normal. Seeking connection with Barger and Wilson, Edelstein opened up about her religious obligations — talking about the need to deep-clean her house, down to the smallest breadcrumb, in preparation for Passover — but was rattled by a jokey, disrespectful response to her faith.
“It made me uncomfortable,” she testified, “and so I just didn’t talk to them about [my religious practice] anymore. … But other than that, we didn’t have a poor relationship.”
Relations with Stephens seemed solid, too, apart from some gripes about her cluttered office. Edelstein handled much of his civil docket, she told jurors, since he was more familiar with criminal work. At a birthday lunch for bailiff Wilson, the judge complimented Edelstein’s work.
Barely two weeks later, however, she was fired.
Before asking for time off to observe the upcoming Jewish holidays, Edelstein testified, she’d never discussed her religion with Stephens — and she was genuinely shocked by his “yelling” in response. Stephens could be touchy and exacting, she told jurors, once blowing up because a document listed his name with a wrong middle initial, but he was fundamentally “a very quiet person.”
At the time, Edelstein didn’t know the details of Stephen’s Baptist faith and preaching. In court, she put him on the stand to explain it all: His years on the pulpit, his concept of heaven and hell, his door-to-door attempts to engage non-believers, his view of Judaism, his opinion on whether those who don’t follow Jesus are damned or just “lost.”
(Either way, he testified, they end up in hell, possibly cast into a “lake of fire.”)
Did he have any Jewish friends, she asked? Maybe two or three “at best,” he replied, but he didn’t know if they were observant.
Then he corrected himself: “I actually did fail to point out, Jesus himself … was an observant Jew.”
And did he consider Jesus to be a Jewish friend?
“Oh, absolutely.”
Stephens acknowledged that he’d set the gears turning on Edelstein’s termination almost immediately after she requested her leave, but he insisted that the events were unrelated. He fired her on a Monday morning, the second workday after her request, saying only that she didn’t “fit in,” Edelstein testified.
After litigation started, Stephens offered more specific reasons. Based partly on reports from his assistant Barger, who he said “wouldn’t have any reason to misrepresent something like that,” he cited Edelstein’s insubordination, procrastination, rudeness, and conflicts with Barger and other staff — many of which he couldn’t recall in detail, and none of which he flagged, tried to fix, or documented in real time, he conceded in court.
“I found you very disagreeable and difficult to work with,” he told Edelstein in front of the jurors. “You had a very contentious personality [that] I knew was not going to change.”
(Assistant Barger, who had supposedly hissed at Edelstein as she left, died in 2021. Many of her descriptions of Edelstein’s work behavior were contradicted by the testimony of other witnesses, according to court documents — including by bailiff Wilson, who described Barger to jurors as “abrasive” and “nasty.”)
The firing itself had taken place in Edelstein’s office, with Barger “smirking” behind the judge as he delivered the news, Edelstein testified. In shock, Edelstein begged to be allowed resign with three month’s notice, but to no avail: She was told to leave by noon.
The ensuing months and years were very difficult, she testified. Previously her family’s main provider, she now struggled to feed them, falling back on charity from her own religious community.
“They helped me with the food pantry,” she testified. “They helped feed my children. We couldn’t make rent one month — they paid my rent.”
Work was hard to find. According to her lawsuit, Stephens’ colleagues were bad-mouthing her around town. “Within a week, it seemed that the networking possibilities were closed off to me,” she testified.
Without a government job, Edelstein’s student loans no longer were headed for forgiveness. She and her husband, who worked at Wal-Mart, sold off furniture and other belongings. Tensions grew within the family; she developed depression and diabetes; and eventually her husband left her, she testified.
Desperate for money, Edelstein applied for janitorial jobs and even approached the local McDonald’s — she had worked at the fast-food chain during college — only for the manager there to laugh at her, she told jurors.
“He said, ‘You’re a lawyer? … What did you do wrong?‘”
Stung, she considered altering her résumé to delete all of her legal experience, just so she’d be taken more seriously by low-wage employers. Finally, just a few months before the trial, she began working as a sales consultant. She now earns $55,000 a year, she testified, well below her 2016 salary at the Butler County court.
After finding in her favor on February 4, jurors awarded Edelstein $835,000 in back pay, plus a further $250,000 for her emotional and other non-monetary harms. They levied a further $35,000 in punitive damages against Stephens for “conduct which was malicious or in reckless disregard of [Edelstein’s] rights.”
Stephens remains listed as an active judge in Butler County. His former bailiff Jamie Wilson testified at trial that she finally quit her position last year after working with him for more than two decades, telling jurors that she had tired of behavior that, according to her, Stephens himself acknowledged as “toxic” and “destructive.”
» Read Edelstein’s amended complaint
» Read Stephens’ testimony about his beliefs
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Edelstein v. Stephens. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Kimberly Edelstein represented herself in the case.
