Facts and Background

• Facts and Background:

  La-Kebbia Wilson, a Black woman, worked in the City of Fresno's Code Enforcement Department as a Community Revitalization Specialist from 2004 to 2013, and then again from 2016 to 2022. In her first period of employment, she worked alongside a man named Howard Lacy. When the City brought her back to work in 2016, Mr. Lacy had been promoted to a supervisory position.

  The Community Revitalization Specialist position is a mix of office work and field work. The job requires going into the field to inspect properties, conducting investigations, working with law enforcement, the fire department, and other city officials to enforce environmental and zoning regulations throughout the city. The job requires a city-issued phone, computer, desk, cubicle, and truck.

  Around the same time Ms. Wilson returned to work in 2016, the City hired co-plaintiff, Charles Smith, as a part-time employee in the Code Enforcement Department. Mr. Smith is a white man. By that time, Mr. Lacy had been promoted to supervisor and Mr. Lacy was Mr. Smith's direct supervisor.

  After months of allegedly racial/discriminatory conduct by Mr. Lacy, plaintiff Wilson made a complaint of harassment and discrimination in August 2017. The City investigated and found no violations. The City hired Mr. Smith into a full-time position in April 2018. He had a 12-month probationary period during which he was employed at-will. 

  Sometime in June 2018, Mr. Lacy had a meeting with upper management in which he complained that Ms. Wilson had made a false complaint of race discrimination against him and demanded the City investigate Ms. Wilson for creating a hostile work environment against him. 

  Days later, Mr. Lacy transferred Mr. Smith to the tire team, which is responsible for locating and safely removing and disposing of abandoned tires throughout the City. Work on the tire team requires heavy lifting and physical labor. Mr. Smith described the transfer to the tire team as career suicide. While on the tire team he heard Mr. Lacy make a racial slur against plaintiff Wilson. He later testified that he was conflicted over what to do, and he decided to resign. That night he wrote a vulgar email to the manager of the Code Enforcement Department with Mr. Lacy and several other supervisors cc'd. The following day he had a call with Ms. Wilson and told her everything that had happened. She immediately went to report everything to management and on her way to speak to a manager she yelled out, "They are all fucking liars. All of them!" She then reported the incident and took the rest of the day off.

  The City's HR Department immediately opened an investigation into Ms. Wilson's use of profanity. Ultimately, the City issued disciplinary action against Ms. Wilson for "conduct unbecoming." It took more than a month from the time Ms. Wilson reported the racial slur before the City opened an investigation into the slur. In the meantime, nobody took any action to separate Ms. Wilson and Mr. Lacy despite a demand by Ms. Wilson's union to put Mr. Lacy on administrative leave. In that time frame, Mr. Lacy himself requested a transfer and described the situation as "extremely volatile," yet the City still took no action for weeks. Ms. Wilson claimed that in this time frame somebody had gone to her cubicle, snapped the arm off her glasses that she had left on her desk, and taken a set of ear buds that she had also left on her desk and tied the ear buds up with a zip tie and hung the zip tie from her computer terminal like a noose.

  The City ultimately put both Mr. Lacy and Ms. Wilson out on paid administrative leave under the pretext that they both needed to be on leave to protect the integrity of the investigation. The City hired an outside attorney to conduct an investigation into Mr. Lacy's racist slur. The attorney hired was a family law attorney from Fresno named Dallas Selling. Her retainer was limited in scope to cover an investigation into Ms. Wilson's complaint against Mr. Lacy – nothing else.

  About five months into the investigation, Ms. Selling had submitted a draft report concluding her investigation. In response, HR Director Jeff Cardell emailed Ms. Selling and asked her to expand the scope of her investigation into an investigation of some sort of unspecified "conduct/behavior" of Ms. Wilson. He directed her to bifurcate the investigations into Mr. Lacy and Ms. Wilson. He also emailed her names of a number of witnesses he wanted her to interview, several of whom corroborated that Mr. Lacy had made numerous racially offensive comments at work throughout his career. Ms. Selling's investigation lasted an additional nine months, for a total investigation time of nearly 13 months. Before the investigation was complete, the City Attorney, Doug Sloan, decided to bring both Ms. Wilson and Mr. Lacy back to work because by that time they had both been on paid administrative leave for about a year.

  Mr. Sloan and two other lawyers from the City Attorney's Office met with Ms. Wilson and her union representative to notify them that both she and Mr. Lacy would be returning to work even though the investigation was not complete. Ms. Wilson objected to this, but they told her she was to go back to work and start over from a clean slate. The City later initiated formal disciplinary action against Ms. Wilson for allegedly being loud, abusive, disruptive, and aggressive during her return to work meeting with the City Attorneys.

  In August 2019, Mr. Lacy filed a lawsuit against the City for discrimination. In his lawsuit, he alleged that Ms. Wilson was racist towards him, and had created a hostile work environment by making numerous false accusations of racism against him. Local media ran a story on Mr. Lacy's lawsuit. Mr. Lacy's lawsuit was eventually dismissed under California's anti-SLAPP statute.

  In September 2019, Ms. Selling completed her investigation and concluded there was insufficient evidence that Mr. Lacy violated any of the City's policies prohibiting harassment, discrimination or retaliation. Simultaneously, Ms. Selling concluded that Ms. Wilson had created a hostile work environment, and was loud, abusive, aggressive, and disruptive. Ms. Selling concluded that Ms. Wilson and Mr. Lacy could not continue working together and recommended Ms. Wilson be terminated. Jeff Cardell prepared a letter to Ms. Wilson indicating the results of the investigation. 

  In a private conversation with a supervisor, Ms. Wilson said "It felt like the City is saying fuck you, n---a all over again." This comment led to the Civil Service Board terminating Ms. Wilson in the fall of 2019 for the use of profanity.

  In a writ to the California Superior Court, the Court overturned the termination and found the Civil Service Board exceeded the scope of its authority.  Ms. Wilson returned to work following the Superior Court's ruling on the writ.

  In 2022 the city then fired Ms. Wilson a second time for poor performance. 

• Plaintiff's Contentions:

  That Defendant City of Fresno harassed, discriminated against and retaliated against both plaintiffs in violation of FEHA and Title VII.

  That Howard Lacy had a lengthy history of making racist comments in the workplace. A former manager in the Code Enforcement Department testified that Mr. Lacy made two racially offensive comments to her while she was his boss. That manager reported Mr. Lacy to Jeff Cardell, who was the Director of the City's HR department. Mr. Cardell was the top HR person in a city with over 10,000 employees. No investigation was conducted. No disciplinary action was taken. The city promoted Mr. Lacy into a supervisory position shortly after his boss reported him to the HR Director for making racially offensive comments at work.

  The manager also testified that Mr. Lacy was obsessed with and hated La-Kebbia Wilson. Although he never made any overtly racist comments about Ms. Wilson to the manager, he did constantly complain to the manager that Ms. Wilson was lazy, she was never where she was supposed to be, and claimed she was stealing City time by saying she was out in the field working but not actually working. The manager told him to drop it but he did not.

  Ms. Wilson claimed that when she returned to work in 2016, several events occurred that led her to believe she was being discriminated against. Mr.  Lacy assigned her a City truck that was disgusting and filthy (both inside and outside) and had a two-inch piece of metal protruding out of the driver's seat, making it impossible to sit in without an additional seat cushion. The city delayed repairs to the truck. 

  Further, that Mr. Lacy assigned her a filthy and disgusting tool bag. When she complained about the tool bag, she again got pushback and was told the City did not have it in the budget to buy her a new tool bag. She continued to escalate the issue until she got a useable tool bag.

  The City also failed to assign Ms. Wilson a cubicle when she first returned in 2016. Once Ms. Wilson was finally assigned a cubicle, her assigned cubicle was in a noisy corridor with a lot of foot traffic. Unlike everybody else's cubicle, her cubicle had no partitions such that she could not avoid seeing and hearing all the people coming and going as she was trying to concentrate. The computer and office equipment assigned to her was old and substandard. 

  Mr. Lacy also targeted Ms. Wilson for parking violations. City employees including Ms. Wilson routinely parked their City trucks for extended periods of time in the one-hour parking area behind City Hall. On one occasion in 2017, Ms. Wilson was issued a parking ticket for parking her City vehicle in the one-hour parking area for longer than one hour even though other employees were not ticketed. 

  In his testimony, plaintiff  Mr. Smith told of a visit with Mr. Lacy to a black resident's home in Southwest Fresno and that afterward Mr. Lacy made racist comments and referred again to Ms. Wilson. Mr. Smith told Mr. Lacy he wanted no part of his racist campaign against Ms. Wilson and he needed to just leave him out of it. 

• Defendant's Contentions:

  That no harassment, discrimination or retaliation occurred. That Ms. Wilson was a bad employee and was hostile, abusive, aggressive, disruptive, and created a hostile work environment. That Mr. Smith was a disgruntled employee, who made the whole story up because he was upset about being transferred to the tire team.