Court backs gay officer in CHP lawsuit
A state appeals court reinstated a lawsuit Tuesday by a former Bay Area California Highway Patrol officer who said fellow officers harassed and endangered him for years because he was gay, and the patrol did nothing to protect him.
Jay Brome spent 20 years with the CHP in San Francisco, Contra Costa and Solano counties, before taking disability retirement in February 2016 because of stress that he said had led him to the brink of suicide. His lawsuit, filed in September 2016, alleged a long series of abuses, ranging from daily lockerroom insults and mockery to the Solano County office’s refusal to provide backup assistance, leaving him to handle hazardous pursuits and crashes on his own.
The Solano County office, where Brome transferred in 2008, named him its officer of the year in 2013 — and then chose not to display his pho
tograph in the office, instead leaving up the picture of the previous year’s winner, the suit said.
A Solano County judge dismissed the suit in 2018, agreeing with the CHP that Brome should have filed it by December 2015, a year after he suffered the last incident that led him to go on leave and apply for workers’ compensation. Superior Court Judge Michael Mattice also said that Brome’s working conditions had not been intolerable, so any lawsuit he was allowed to pursue could not include a claim that the CHP had effectively fired him.
But the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said Tuesday that the usual oneyear deadline could be extended in Brome’s case because his successful claim against the CHP for a workers’ compensation claim was based on the same allegations of harassment, discrimination and supervisory indifference that he later raised in his lawsuit.
“Brome’s superior officers were well aware of his discrimination concerns” while addressing his workers’ compensation claim through October 2015, said Justice Gordon Burns in the 30 ruling. “After years of harassment and hostility due to antigay bias at the patrol,” he said, Brome had a basis for his failure to sue until 11 months later.
He also said Brome can try to prove he was “constructively discharged,” or forced to retire.
Unlike his colleagues, “Brome was routinely forced to respond to highrisk enforcement and accident scenes on his own,” Burns said. He said the evidence, though in dispute, could “support a finding that the patrol knowingly permitted the intolerable conditions.”
Brome, now 55 and living in Vallejo, said he looks forward to taking his case to a jury.
“Any time I brought up the issues, it was more about killing the messenger,” he said in an interview after the ruling. “I did everything I could within the system. The system is meant to gloss over it.
“I miss my job,” said Brome, who joined the CHP at age 31. “I thought it was important to find a career where I made a difference. I guess I was too idealistic.”
Brome “did everything he could to try to have his concerns addressed internally by the CHP,” said his lawyer, Lisa Ells. Besides disciplining one officer who failed to back him up, she said, “no one ever did anything.”
In support of his case, gayrights organizations, led by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said in a court filing that Brome’s experience was not unusual for LGBT law enforcement officers in California.
“Verbal insults, refusals to provide backup, denials of career opportunities, and other forms of discrimination have plagued LGBT law enforcement officers for decades,” the group said.
In response to the ruling, the CHP said in a statement that it “holds its employees to high standards of conduct and strictly enforces its Equal Employment Opportunity policy designed to ensure a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.”