Court: Must consider claim against judge
A federal appeals court sided Friday with a former special dockets coordinator in Franklin County Municipal Court and ordered there must be consideration of her claim of a hostile work environment against Judge James P. O’grady.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati affirmed most of the district court’s earlier dismissals of a 2016 lawsuit filed by Andrea Boxill against three other Municipal Court judges and an administrator, ruling that Boxill had failed to show they “knew about her alleged harassment and failed to act.”
But the panel ruled “specific allegations” made by Boxill against O’grady stated “a plausible hostile work environment claim” that must be considered by the lower court.
Boxill alleged in court documents that O’grady made sexist and racist comments directed at her for years after he was elected to the bench in 2011. When she complained, “no administrator or judge acted on these reports, but each discouraged plaintiff from any action,” according to documents.
O’grady is white and Boxill is African American.
Boxill also alleged she was demoted and subjected to “unwarranted scrutiny” of her work in early 2014. Feeling she was being forced from her position and under “great emotional distress,” she sought and obtained another job, resigning her Municipal Court position in August 2014, according to documents. She later filed suit, seeking $2 million in damages.
In court filings, O’grady and other defendants countered that Boxill “does not allege any specific facts to support raceor gender-based discriminatory harassment on the part of the individual defendants, let alone discriminatory harassment so severe that it rendered her workplace objectively and subjectively racially or sexually hostile.”
After leaving Municipal Court, Boxill served as deputy director of then-gov. John Kasich’s Cabinet Opiate Action Team for more than four years before being named an administrator in the Columbus Public Health Department earlier this year.