Deputy to appeal ruling halting whistleblower suit

Bridgette Bott says supervisors punished her for defending polo club founder John Goodman

For nearly six years, a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputy has tried to make the case that her supervisors punished her unfairly for defending Wellington polo club founder John Goodman.

In late 2012, sheriff’s officials and prosecutors said Goodman deliberately broke an ankle monitor while on house arrest awaiting trial on a DUI manslaughter charge.

But Deputy Bridgette Bott, one of two paid guards at the time, later testified that Goodman had not tried to escape and that the monitor merely malfunctioned. Bott said she was slapped with a 40-hour unpaid suspension in retaliation for speaking the truth.

Now, she’s facing even longer odds to bring her claims before a jury. A federal judge has blocked Bott’s Whistleblower and First Amendment lawsuit from a trial that was to start Monday in West Palm Beach.

Bott’s attorney said she will appeal the Jan. 23 ruling by U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks. Their hope is that the 11th

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will allow the dispute to go before a jury.

She’s seeking more than $150,000 for lost wages and other damages, plus attorneys’ fees and costs.

Teri Barbera, spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, declined to discuss the case.

“As a general policy the Sheriff ’s Office does not comment on court rulings,” she said.

Lawyers for the agency previously labeled Bott’s claims as “meritless and unsupported” in court filings.

Bott, 50, remains on the road patrol, but believes she’s still getting the cold shoulder because of the Goodman claim.

Isidro Garcia, Bott’s lawyer, said Bott recently became the target of another Internal Affairs investigation but has not been taken off the streets.

“She’s still being harassed,” he said. “Some people will never for-

give her for speaking the truth.”

The Goodman detail

It all started with Bott’s decision to sign up for a security detail arranged in May 2012 after multimillionaire Goodman was convicted in his first trial.

At that time, the founder of International Polo Club Palm Beach was paying $2,000 a day for two deputies to watch him 24⁄7 at his nearly 80-acre property.

As a single mom, Bott said she seized the chance to make $33 an hour for working eight-hour shifts guarding Goodman on some of her regular days off.

It was going well until Goodman stepped out of his shower with his monitor buzzing on the night of Oct. 10, 2012. Goodman was taken right to jail, and the next day Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters it seemed suspicious.

The sheriff released photos of the damaged monitor, which appeared almost completely cracked open, its internal mechanisms exposed. Bradshaw said it looked like Goodman deliberately smashed the black box around his ankle with the edge of a handheld mirror.

At a hearing two months later, Goodman’s defense experts told a judge the break was accidental, and there was no evidence that a tool or mirror was used to damage the device.

Bott also testified as a witness for Goodman, and the judge ordered Goodman’s release from jail under a $7 million appellate bond. Bott was banned from the Goodman detail.

“She stuck to the truth and she got punished for it,” Garcia said.

But in court documents, the Sheriff’s Office argued that it ordered Bott’s suspension well before the Goodman incident.

It said Bott was disciplined over her mishandling of a residential call involving a suicidal man on July 11, 2012. The man killed himself not long after Bott and another deputy left.

Bott insists she wasn’t told about the suspension until Nov. 20, after the ankle monitor issue, and that she did nothing wrong on the suicide call.

The discipline may have been “in the works, but nothing was finalized,” Garcia said, contending that the suspension was a direct result of “crossing the official story” not the suicide call.

The legal claims

Bott’s first allegation was a whistleblower claim. She said she was retaliated against after she “disclosed a conspiracy to obstruct justice” in Goodman’s case, which allegedly involved false testimony by other deputies intended to end Goodman’s house arrest.

But Judge Middlebrooks ruled that Bott’s claim failed to show that the supervisors who suspended her were aware of her involvement in the Goodman matter. The judge also noted that the suspension had been in the works, and there’s no evidence or “causal relationship” that it had anything to do with her defense of Goodman.

The second allegation was a First Amendment claim. This involves Bott taking the witness stand in state court on Dec. 18, 2012, and testifying there was no proof Goodman tampered with his tracking device.

Bott said that when she examined the monitor it had only a small crack in it. She alleged that a sergeant later “broke open the ankle monitor while inspecting the device, and then falsely claimed that Goodman had broken it.”

Bott argued her subsequent removal from the Goodman detail was an act of retaliation that violated her free speech rights.

Judge Middlebrooks, however, ruled that Bott’s testimony on Goodman’s behalf was not protected by the First Amendment because she was speaking as a government employee and not a private citizen.

The judge cited a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which found “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”

So Middlebrooks concluded that Bott’s lawsuit should not advance to the trial stage.

As for Goodman, he was convicted at a 2014 retrial focusing on the tragic death of Scott Wilson, a 23-year-old University of Central Florida engineering graduate.

Goodman, 55, has lost all of his appeals, and he’s serving a 16-year state prison sentence.

Bott