A jury resumes deliberating Wednesday in the trial of a whistleblower lawsuit in which a Los Angeles city auditor contends she was bypassed for special investigator positions in a backlash for reporting what she believed was unlawful activity.
Plaintiff Soledad Gomez contended she discovered the alleged wrongdoing during her 2019 temporary appointment as a special investigator in the City Controller’s Office. The Los Angeles Superior Court panel pondered the case for a brief time on Tuesday after hearing final arguments and will continue its deliberations Wednesday.
Attorneys for the city stated in their court papers that Gomez performed “routine investigative work” and that the Controller’s Office, Ethics Commission and City Attorney’s Office all had legitimate, non-retaliatory reasons for selecting candidates other than the plaintiff for the positions for which she applied.
“Even if plaintiff could establish protected activity, she presented no substantial evidence that the City’s Controller’s Office declined to offer her a permanent position because of it,” the city’s lawyers contend. “To the contrary, the evidence showed that the city itself authorized referral of her findings from her investigation of (the) DWP to the FBI, undermining any inference of retaliatory animus.”
But in pretrial ruling denying the city’s motion to dismiss Gomez’s single claim for whistleblower retaliation, Judge Dean Kitchens wrote that the city had not shown by “clear and convincing evidence that (Gomez) would have not been hired for other legitimate reasons with respect to every adverse action taken against her.”
In March, Gomez’s fellow litigant, Beth Kennedy, an auditor for the City Controller’s Office, reached a tentative settlement in her part of the case. She alleged her supervisor discouraged her from closely examining some Department of Water and Power contracts, including one that is part of an FBI investigation. No terms were divulged.
According to Kennedy’s claims, she began working as an auditor well over two decades ago. She contended that a supervisor told her in 2019 that a recent DWP whistleblower had recently died on the job and that it was “basically murder.”
The boss then told Kennedy to be careful with her audit by not asking a lot of questions and to avoid “digging too deep.” Kennedy told the boss that they should report the information to the FBI, but he said that was not necessary, according to the suit.
Kennedy also contended that there was a break-in at her La Habra home in June 2019, hours after she and her staff had questioned DWP managers about the handling of some of its contracts. Kennedy was on the phone with her ex-husband at the time and screamed at him to call 911, then she barricaded herself and waited for police to arrive, the suit states.