Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Gov. DeSantis defends firing of state analyst
In angry attack, he cites insubordination and a messy criminal case
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched an angry attack on a fired Department of Health data manager Wednesday, downplaying her role in operating the state’s online COVID-19 platform and airing her messy legal fight with a former boyfriend — a tangle that includes charges against her for stalking.
He did not comment about emails showing that officials at the health department ordered 30-year-old mapping expert Rebekah Jones to sever public access to raw data on the state’s coronavirus website, except to say that she was using flawed data.
Some data that had been used for critical news coverage about early signs of coronavirus in Florida was removed from the site in early May, but it has since been restored. DeSantis said Jones was a renegade and isn’t a data scientist or epidemiologist.
“She should have been dismissed, long before that” based on her background, he said, which includes an accusation of cyber sexual harassment.
Standing next to Vice
President Mike Pence at a new conference in Orlando on Wednesday, he argued that Florida remains transparent about how the virus is spreading.
“Our data is available, our data is transparent,’’ a bristling DeSantis responded to media on Wednesday. “So any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative
trying to be spun. And part of the reason is that because you got a lot of people in [the news media] who wax poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York. ‘Wait two weeks, Florida’s gonna be next.’ ‘Just like Italy, wait two weeks.’ Well, hell, we’re eight weeks away from that and it hasn’t happened.’
DeSantis has complained repeatedly about dire predictions in the media, though they have quoted official projections like those from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, a leading model. The White House, too, often cites IHME’s projections.
Jones alerted users of the online dashboard last Friday that she had been removed from the site she said she gave all her working attention to. She said her fatal error was her commitment to transparency and public access.
Reached that evening on the phone, she said she’d worked non-stop for two months catering to dashboard users and needed a break. She said her parents’ home was destroyed in a tornado in Mississippi on Easter, “and I didn’t miss a beat.”
“I really am starting to realize that email may have been too much,” she said Friday. But she said going forward, “I honestly would not expect the kind of access as far as reaching the people in charge of managing [the virus dashboard] 24⁄7 the way I did.”
Days later, she was fired for insubordination, state officials said Tuesday.
Internal emails from May 4 and May 5 show two health department employees separately ordering Jones to cut off access to raw data that could be downloaded. She responded that “this is the wrong call.”
DeSantis issued a stay-at-home order April 1. The data that was temporarily removed showed cases of illness that emerged in Florida before March. The governor’s office said Tuesday that the data was not reliable for analysis, because the understanding of which symptoms denote potential COVID-19 illness changed over time.
Jones’ accusation led to calls by members of Congress and other elected officials — all Democrats — for an investigation. Left-leaning political groups, some of which campaigned against DeSantis in the 2018 election, sent him a letter Wednesday asking for an investigation.
Earlier this year, Jones had received praise for her work on the dashboard. In March, Syracuse University featured her in a story headlined “Geospatial scientist Rebekah Jones discovered a love for geography at Syracuse University and now she’s helping the state of Florida with its emergency response to the pandemic.”
But Wednesday, DeSantis said Jones was neither an epidemiologist nor “the chief architect of our web portal” and was putting up data “which the scientists didn’t believe was valid data.”
He mentioned that besides a geography degree, she has a degree in journalism. According to the Syracuse University article, Jones went on to earn a dual master’s degree in geography and mass communication from Louisiana State University in 2014. She was later a geography doctoral student at Florida State University.
Only this week did DeSantis learn that Jones had been charged with stalking last summer, he said. Two other charges, for cyberstalking and cyber sexual harassment, were dropped. He said he wants to know how she kept her job after the charges were filed.
“I have a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment, so her supervisor dismissed her because of a lot of those reasons, and it was a totally valid way, but she should have been dismissed, long before that,” DeSantis said.
Court records show that Jones’ encounters with police and courts were all the nasty fallout from a romantic relationship gone bad.
According to a lengthy account written by Jones and attached as an exhibit last June to one of her lawsuits against Garrett Michael Sweeterman, he was a student in a class she taught at FSU. The toxic clash cost her her job there, she wrote.
She was married with a young son, and she was seven years older than Sweeterman, according to her 342-page manifesto, which includes their alleged text message conversations. She says their relationship began when he no longer was her student and that he got her pregnant. She had the baby, a girl.
In April 2018 and August 2019, Sweeterman sought — and was granted — injunctions against her for stalking, Leon County court records show.
Jones lobbed some of the legal volley back. In 2017 and 2018, she sued him for dating violence. The first case was voluntarily dismissed, the second denied by the courts. The following year, she sued him for paternity; the case appears to have been dismissed.
In the 2019 summer stalking case, he accused her, among other things, of posting nude photos— “revenge porn,” the court document says — and giving the online link to his employer and to family members.
The case is pending; Jones has not been convicted.
Sweeterman declined to speak about his experience. An attorney, Tiffany Cruz, emailed the South Florida Sun Sentinel advising that “Ms. Jones filed a number of legal actions against him, which the court records will show were rightly dismissed by her and the court. Mr. Sweeterman wants to move on with his life, and does not wish to comment further.”
Reached by text message, Jones on Wednesday said the stalking charge is the result of her publishing her accusations. She said she wrote about “what he did to me and how the university protected my abuser, for a blog at my friend’s request. I named him, and shared it broadly. He filed a complaint against me for cyber harassment.”
She did not comment on the governor’s sentiments.