La Russa animal rescue riven by suits, family split
Allegations of toxic workplace mar reputation of venerable nonprofit
In the past week, the image of Tony La Russa’s Animal Rescue Foundation as a happy place for people to fall in love with their next pet has been tainted by turmoil and confusion, roiled by divisions within the founding family and allegations that its leaders nurtured a “toxic” workplace culture, rife with bullying, favoritism, retaliation, and ageist and racist comments.
Co-founded by Tony and Elaine La Russa in the early 1990s, the venerable Bay Area nonprofit that finds homes for stray and abandoned pets faces four lawsuits from former and current employees. Meanwhile, a public dispute between Tony La Russa, former Oakland A’s manager, and his wife and two daughters has
developed over the future of longtime ARF executive director Elena Bicker and board chairman Greg McCoy.
The lawsuits claim that Bicker, McCoy and even La Russa himself “tolerated, engendered and permitted a toxic workplace culture.”
But Tony La Russa is standing by the two, who he believes have been unfairly targeted for complaints from employees. He said he will continue to support ARF and its mission, as he’s done the past 30 years.
“We haven’t accomplished what we’ve accomplished over the years and earned (people’s) trust by being a toxic environment,” La Russa said in an interview with this news organization.
Meanwhile, his wife and daughters Bianca and Devon La Russa have resigned from the board and say they won’t have anything to do with ARF until Bicker and McCoy are gone.
“While we continue to believe wholeheartedly in ARF’s mission, we are unable to rejoin the organization until ‘reasoned accountability’ is applied fairly and universally,” they said in a statement emailed Thursday. “When Greg McCoy and Elena Bicker are held accountable for their actions, we will gladly rejoin the team. We look forward to that day.”
Bicker has declined to comment on the allegations. McCoy says an internal investigation found no examples of inappropriate behavior by ARF’s management or evidence of substandard service.
But employees paint a different picture. One of the four lawsuits filed against ARF alleges that the nonprofit fired its human resources manager in October when she called for an “appropriate” investigation of complaints made by dozens of employees, which date back to at least 2019. In another lawsuit, a worker in her 60s alleges she was the victim of ageism when she lost her job running the veterinary clinic this spring after Bicker was heard talking about her “being slow” and “needing to go.”
Meanwhile, an associate director with ARF’s lauded Pets and Vets program, which pairs veterans experiencing PTSD with rescue dogs trained to be service pets, resigned in disgust in August 2020. She claims Bicker, who has been executive director since 2006, targeted her for retaliation and harassment after she made repeated complaints about Bicker going back to 2015.
During the past year, as COVID precautions took hold, ARF laid off a third of its employees, made pet adoptions a virtual process and halted group training for its Pets and Vets program. But the lawsuits suggest that ARF’s troubles predate the pandemic, and two veterans, who worked for or participated in Pets and Vets, told this news organization that they don’t believe all the cuts to the program were necessitated by the pandemic.
“I witnessed firsthand Elena Bicker and Greg McCoy destroy the Pets and Vets program while still raising money from donors,” said David Fuller, a Marine veteran with PTSD who trained his service dog at ARF. As a clinical social worker with Veterans Affairs in Martinez, Fuller says he will no longer refer veterans to ARF if Bicker and McCoy remain in charge.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Venardi said ARF’s leaders ran the nonprofit “like a personal fiefdom,” while employees claim ARF used the pandemic as an excuse to rid itself of workers who complained too much or who considered unionizing.
The lawsuits also allege: Bicker regularly “ranted” about employees and then fired them; the human relations manager received a complaint from an employee who said Bicker laughingly yelled out generic names for Black women when she couldn’t remember the name of a Black consultant; Bicker “demeaned” Black Lives Matters protesters by showing a photo of black Labradors with the caption, “Black Dogs Matter”; and Bicker laughed off La Russa making a joke about a Black guest at a 2018 ARF event speaking in “ebonics.”
The lawsuit also refers to complaints made by employees last spring that 12 dogs were denied appropriate care or transferred to shelters for possible euthanizing, due to the “petty hostilities” of a former director who had been protected by Bicker.
In an interview and in a statement Tony La Russa released this week, he acknowledged that he resigned from the board, but denied he did so out of concerns about ARF’s leadership, as his wife and daughters contended earlier this week. He said he’s heard from donors who support Bicker and McCoy and blamed allegations and complaints of bullying and racist and derogatory comments on “relentless, ruthless” employees.
Just two years ago, Tony and Elaine La Russa struck a united, celebratory pose with Bicker and McCoy for the April 2019 groundbreaking of a 23,800-square-foot addition to ARF’s gleaming Walnut Creek headquarters. Flush with more than $20 million raised from a capital campaign, the organization hoped to use the extra space to rescue more stray dogs and cats and to expand its Pets and Vets program.
Now, Fuller contends, “The way Elena and Greg have treated ARF’s staff and veterans is unforgivable.”
But Tony La Russa says it is a group of bitter employees who are at fault.
“I can’t wait to confront those people with 30 years of contacts with, you know, those types of issues,” the 76-year-old former Oakland A’s manager said. “They’ve gone way too far, and they’re not being held accountable.”