A former Long Beach police officer who alleged she was subjected to sexual harassment by a male sergeant and wrongfully fired while on vacation in 2022 has been denied a new trial by a judge who said that mutual following on social media and liking ones posts are as “ubiquitous as wearing blue jeans and eating pizza.”
Plaintiff Alma Magana contended in her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that she was terminated for complaining about the sergeant’s intrusions into her personal life. She also maintained that she was mysteriously drugged during an off-duty date with a boyfriend and subjected to two unwarranted internal affairs probes.
On Tuesday, Judge Jerrold Abeles turned down Magana’s motions for a new trial or judgment notwithstanding the verdict. Magana contended that the judge made legal errors that hurt her case before the jury, including his exclusion of the testimony of Danielle Cortez, an LBPD job applicant.
According to Magana’s attorneys’ court papers, Cortez would have provided probative MeToo evidence regarding a sergeant’s alleged inappropriate conduct toward her, including the contacting of Cortez through social media, sending her heart and fire emojis, asking for her personal cell phone number, offering to help her prepare for her interview and asking her on a date. Magana contended that she was harassed by the same sergeant, who she alleged contacted her by phone and through her social media, forcing her to block him from her accounts.
“The court properly found that Cortez’s various interactions with Lehman were not sufficiently similar to his conduct toward plaintiff in this case,” the judge wrote. “Importantly, Cortez was not an employee of the Long Beach Police Department, she was a job applicant. Therefore, (the sergeant) never possessed any formal supervisory power over her like he did over plaintiff.”
Further, the similarities with Magana’s case were at best generic, the judge further wrote.
“Mutual following on social media and liking ones posts are as ubiquitous as wearing blue jeans and eating pizza,” according to Abeles.
In its May 13 verdict, jurors found that although Magana complained of gender discrimination and harassment, her speaking out was not a “substantial factor” in the city’s decision to terminate her.
The sergeant and a lieutenant were co-defendants in the case. The jury rejected Magana’s claims that both harassed her.
According to Magana’s suit, she worked for the LBPD for several years in an exemplary manner, but the LBPD and the sergeant began pretextually targeting her on the basis of her gender and that after she complained, the department retaliated against and eventually discharged her.
Magana began her law enforcement career in 2010 as a police explorer, was hired in March 2014 as a police services specialist and in April 2015 began her courses at the police academy before becoming an LBPD officer, the suit stated.
The sergeant often quizzed Magana about who she was dating and tried to communicate with her through her personal phone, prompting her to block the sergeant on all her social media accounts due to his “persistent, harassing behavior,” the suit filed in August 2020 stated.
The sergeant also had Magana meet with him at random locations to try and talk about inappropriate and private topics with her, but when she declined to “succumb to his advances,” he harassed her and told her to “step it up” at work, the suit alleged.
Magana filed a complaint about the sergeant in November 2020 with her supervising lieutenant, telling him that the sergeant “made her hate going to work, but neither the lieutenant nor the department did anything about the problems,” the suit stated.
“The department allowed (the sergeant’s) conduct to go unpunished in perpetuation of its discriminatory practices toward female officers wherein harassment by male officers goes unpunished,” according to the suit, which further stated that Magana was subsequently reassigned to traffic duty and other less desirable jobs.
Ten days after Magana complained about the sergeant, she was detained by the Orange County Sheriff’s Dept. in Mission Viejo while off duty with her then-boyfriend and a third person she knew only by the name “Ish,” the suit stated.
During the outing, Magana was drugged and the antihistamine diphenhydramine was found in her system. Later that night, Magana and her boyfriend began arguing and the plaintiff was arrested, the suit further stated.
The LBPD investigated Magana’s actions that day and in June 2022 the department found true four out of five allegations against her, including that she was insubordinate for refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test, the suit stated.
The department found in favor of Magana while investigating her conduct during another off-duty encounter with another boyfriend in Palm Springs in September 2021, the suit stated. Magana contended that the two internal affairs investigations were done in retaliation for her complaints about the sergeant were used to justify her October 2022 firing just as she was to return from vacation.