$875,000 payout settles lawsuit

Female dispatchers accused Lake County Sheriff’s Office of sexual harassment

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office will pay three women $875,000 to settle a lawsuit in which the women claimed they faced sexual harassment on the job as dispatchers.

The settlement brings an end to a years-long saga that helped put former Undersheriff Fernando Mendoza in jail, ousted former Sheriff Rodney Fenske and brought in new Sheriff Amy Reyes amid a significant shake-up at the sheriff’s office and allegations of a coverup.

The dispatchers — Maria Chavez, Chelsa Parsons and Nicole Garner — quit after raising concerns about the way Mendoza and Fenske behaved on the job in late 2017. Chavez has been rehired.

Their complaints prompted an internal investigation that concluded the men’s actions were inappropriate but did not rise to the level of sexual harassment, prompting the women to make their allegations public in November 2017 and eventually to file a lawsuit in 2018.

“I feel very relieved that I can have closure and move forward from this,” Garner said Monday. “I feel that the community is safer because of this and what has happened afterward.”

In the lawsuit, the women claimed Mendoza frequently harassed them by discussing their body parts, suggesting he’d like to have sex with them, asking them about their sex lives, smelling their hair, tickling them and looking down their shirts, among other acts.

“It was very scary,” Garner said Monday. “It was highly intimidating. It was very isolated, and it felt unsafe.”

The women often worked alone — one dispatcher per shift, Parsons said.

“That was how he got away with what he got away with for so long,” she said. “There was nobody to be a witness. And me personally, I didn’t know it was happening to other women until the investigation started. I was afraid no one would believe me, no one would back me up; it would be me against the undersheriff.”

Mendoza, who was fired in November 2017 shortly after the conclusion of the internal investigation, was arrested in December that year and accused of sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who said she came forward after reading news reports about the dispatchers’ allegations. Mendoza was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2019.

In Mendoza’s termination letter, Fenske wrote that the sheriff’s office “does not condone and will not tolerate any form of discrimination or harassment in the work

place.” But the sheriff himself also behaved inappropriately, the lawsuit claimed.

In fact, the third-party investigator hired by the sheriff’s office to do the internal investigation wrote in an initial version of her final report that Fenske also made sexually inappropriate comments at work, including talking about his sex life and sexual conquests. But records unveiled during the lawsuit showed that someone removed all references to the investigator’s findings on Fenske’s behavior before providing the report to the Lake County Board of Commissioners.

“That was somehow scrubbed,” said Iris Halpern, an attorney at Rathod Mohamedbhai LLC who represented the dispatchers. She never found out who removed the references to the sheriff’s misconduct from the report, she said, but called the action “incredibly devastating.”

“It was supposed to be a neutral taxpayer investigation into the sheriff’s office, and someone tampered with it,” she said, adding that the commissioners likely would never have learned of the original report if not for the federal lawsuit.

Lake County Commissioner Sarah Mudge said Tuesday that she couldn’t recall what was in the report provided to the board, but that she was nevertheless glad the settlement now allows all involved to move forward.

Parsons and Garner said Monday they hope the settlement encourages women to stand up against sexual harassment and added they believe the lawsuit has helped to change the culture at the sheriff’s office for the better.

“What happened is not OK,” Garner said. “Somehow there weren’t steps in place to protect us as victims, other people as victims. There was no accountability. It’s very important for the community to know it’s not OK. There has to be accountability and transparency.”

Both said they have confidence in Reyes, who won the position in a 2018 election in which she campaigned in part on a promise to move the sheriff’s office away from a good ol’ boy system. Fenske did not run for re-election.

Neither Reyes nor Fenske returned requests for comment on this story.