Getting records from city difficult
Tribune filed suit to obtain ones connected to fire dept. officials
As Mayor Lori Lightfoot approached her final month in office, her administration released hundreds of pages of mostly unredacted records involving accusations of workplace misconduct in city government after fighting to keep many of them secret for more than two years.
The records involved an investigation connected to Chicago Fire Commissioner Annette Nance-Holt and other Fire Department employees, and separate allegations of workplace discrimination in city government that stemmed from complaints made to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the Illinois Department of Human Rights.
The Tribune made requests for separate sets of records in September 2020 and May 2021. The city resisted, but on appeal in both cases the Illinois attorney general’s office sided with the Tribune and said the records should have been released.
Still, the Lightfoot administration didn’t agree to release them until the Tribune filed a lawsuit and a Cook County judge sided with the newspaper in a September 2022 ruling. The city eventually released records that were so heavily redacted they provided practically no usable information.
That led to more negotiations with the Tribune before a set of legible records was handed over in April.
A spokesman for Lightfoot didn’t directly answer when asked why the office fought so hard to keep the records secret.
“The City is committed to making our records available to the public to the fullest extent possible, consistent with laws and regulations governing confidentiality and privacy,” the spokesman, Ryan Johnson, said in an email.
Despite campaigning on a promise to “bring in the light” and make city government more transparent, Lightfoot and her administration consistently fought requests for public documents made through the state’s Freedom of Information Act and kept a lid on many reports from the city’s inspector general during her four years in office.
“We are within our rights to withhold records when the City believes the material is protected under (the state’s Freedom of Information Act),” Johnson said. “However, the City has fully complied with the Court’s ruling after the Court determined this material was not exempt under federal and state rules and regulations.”
The records showed that following an investigation into allegations of misconduct by NanceHolt and three other Fire Department employees, the city closed the case, stating it found no evidence to substantiate wrongdoing. The person making the initial allegations ultimately retracted her accusations against Nance-Holt, and the city dropped NanceHolt from its investigation, the records show.
The allegations were under investigation at a time the Fire Department was under scrutiny for its handling of sexual harassment and other infractions that had long plagued the department.
In the case involving Nance-Holt, a 300-page investigative file shows a female Fire Department employee told city investigators that an ex-boyfriend, a Chicago firefighter, had shared with another Fire Department employee a sex video the couple had once made.
That employee, a Fire Department lieutenant, was dating Nance-Holt at
the time, the records show. The woman involved in the video accused Nance-Holt of using her knowledge of the video and the accuser’s past relationship with the fire lieutenant to harass her.
The accuser also took her complaint to police, filing a report claiming, among other things, that Nance-Holt was “bullying her and taunting her about the video,” according to a November 2019 police report.
But about two weeks later the accuser told a CPD detective that the information in her initial report to police was “not accurate” and that she didn’t wish to elaborate on her allegations in the report. The police investigation was suspended at that point.
The accuser also later denied to other city investigators that Nance-Holt had bullied her.
In December 2019 an official from the city inspector general’s office sent a letter to the city’s Department of Human Resources about another allegation from the
same woman. In this case, the woman claimed the Fire Department lieutenant used sexually explicit photos in an attempt to blackmail her, according to an interview the IG’s office conducted with the accuser’s direct supervisor.
But when the IG’s office interviewed the accuser, she denied being blackmailed. An IG official informed Human Resources that it would not open a fullfledged probe into the matter. The IG’s office also shared other information about the case with HR, which ended up taking it over.
The HR department investigated for about a year-and-a-half, confirming the existence of the sex video. The firefighter who made it said he shared it with the accuser but denied sharing it with the fire lieutenant.
In June 2021, shortly after Lightfoot announced she’d picked Nance-Holt to take over as fire commissioner, the city officially closed the case with no finding of
wrongdoing.
An email from CFD’s general counsel referenced Nance-Holt dating the Fire Department lieutenant, and said that while Nance-Holt did not directly supervise him “he ultimately reports to her.”
The Tribune confirmed that Nance-Holt notified then-Fire Commissioner Richard C. Ford II in writing of her relationship with the lieutenant, as required by the city.
Reached by the Tribune, Nance-Holt declined to discuss the case. Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford referred all inquiries about the case to the EEOC division of the city’s Department of Human Resources, adding that the Fire Department’s internal affairs division didn’t handle the case.
The EEOC and Illinois Department of Human Rights records include numerous complaints from city employees against their respective agencies for infractions ranging from racial discrimination to sexual harassment.
For instance, at least one complaint against the Fire Department — unconnected to the one involving Nance-Holt — was filed by an employee in 2019 alleging a poster in a CFD facility contained a sexually explicit image.
“The Chicago Fire Department operates under a culture of discrimination, harassment and retaliation with regards to female employees,” the complainant alleged. “The issues are systemic and encompass all sectors of the department, from training, to medical, to Internal Affairs, to manpower, to operations, etc. but due to fear of retaliation in a job where teamwork is paramount, (women) are afraid to speak out.”
Langford, the Fire Department spokesman, said the case is ongoing.
Another complaint detailed the well-publicized allegations against former Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who was fired by Lightfoot in late 2019 for lying about the circumstances of a night out on the town that ended with him being found by police sleeping in the driver’s seat of his city-issued vehicle, which was parked on a street not far from his home.
The complaint against Johnson included sexual misconduct allegations filed by a female subordinate who was with him in the hours before he was found in his vehicle. The allegations, which Johnson has denied, were first made public in a 2020 lawsuit by the then-subordinate.
As is common in transparency lawsuits, city taxpayers will pick up the tab for all legal costs for the fight over the public records. Lawyers for the Tribune said last month those costs amount to tens of thousands of dollars.