The fallout from sexual assault allegations against former San Diego County supervisor and Metropolitan Transit System board chair Nathan Fletcher continues to deepen.
A key insider accused transit agency officials of lying in their initial public response to the allegations against Fletcher, who resigned from both the county Board of Supervisors and the MTS board in their aftermath.
According to a legal claim filed by MTS’ chief information officer Emily Outlaw, transit agency officials wrongly said they had only learned about the allegations against Fletcher when Grecia Figueroa filed her lawsuit in late March. MTS actually learned about them in mid-February, the claim said.
Outlaw’s claim — a legal document required to be filed in advance of any lawsuit against a public agency — was filed late last month.
But San Diego attorney Dan Gilleon, who represents Outlaw, said Wednesday that he withdrew the filing last Thursday because MTS wanted to resolve the dispute informally. “We have not yet re-filed the claim,” Gilleon said by text message.
MTS did not respond to questions Wednesday.
The Outlaw legal claim said that agency officials directed Outlaw to search Figueroa’s computer for personal direct messages last April. After she refused, the claim said, they ordered her staff to hack into one of Figueroa’s messaging accounts.
“Despite knowing about Ms. Figueroa’s allegations for several weeks, MTS enlisted Ms. Outlaw’s IT department in its efforts to misinform the public about its prior knowledge, and to illegally search Ms. Figueroa’s private communications,” stated the claim, which was first reported by the Voice of San Diego.
Among other assertions, the claim said MTS officials asked Outlaw to prove that human resources director Jeff Stumbo never opened an email that Figueroa’s lawyer, Zachary Schumacher, had sent on Feb. 17.
But Outlaw’s claim said her research found that the HR chief had opened the email and an attached letter and had forwarded it to an outside lawyer working for the agency.
After Outlaw informed agency CEO Sharon Cooney that Stumbo had read and forwarded the letter from Schumacher in February, “Ms. Cooney began treating Ms. Outlaw poorly, as though the CEO were trying to get her CIO to quit,” the claim stated.
Following several years of positive job-performance reviews and raises above the agency standard, Outlaw began receiving negative feedback from her supervisors, according to the claim.
“A few months after reporting and resisting illegal conduct, Ms. Cooney recommended that Ms. Outlaw not receive a raise at all, when the company standard was 4 percent this year,” the claim said.
“Other examples of retaliation include forcing Ms. Outlaw to use PTO hours for time she worked and stripping the CIO of the privilege to work remotely,” it said.
Figueroa was a public relations professional for MTS until February, when she says she was wrongly fired after reporting that Fletcher had sexually assaulted her in MTS headquarters and repeatedly harassed her.
She sued in March, days after Fletcher announced he was temporarily stepping away from the Board of Supervisors to receive inpatient treatment for alcohol use and post-traumatic stress.
Fletcher resigned from the MTS board the day the lawsuit was filed and announced his planned resignation from the Board of Supervisors that same week. He vacated his District 4 seat in mid-May.
Both MTS and Fletcher have denied the accusations in the Figueroa complaint. A case-management conference in the case that had been scheduled Dec. 1 has been continued to Jan. 19.
Before it was withdrawn, the claim filed last month alleged retaliation, breach of mandatory duty, negligence and civil-rights violations, among other allegations.
It indicated that Outlaw would seek monetary damages of more than $10,000, including losses related to past and future wages, medical and psychological expenses and unspecified non-economic and punitive damages.
