Theresa Cusick is the former general counsel for the DC Fire & EMS Department who yesterday went public with the details of her lawsuit against the city. Cusick, who was the department’s lawyer for nine years, was let go within three months of the arrival of Chief Dennis Rubin in April, 2007. Cusick believes her dismissal was retaliation for telling Rubin one of his assistant chiefs interfered with a cheating investigation.
In a video deposition by Rubin, provided by Cusick’s attorney at the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the chief claims he got rid of Cusick after she went on an expletive filled tirade about his command staff. Cusick denies such an incident occurred.
A STATter911.com reader reminds us that Theresa Cusick was once on the other side of a complaint by a former fire department employee and according to news reports didn’t like it one bit. It was a very controversial episode in the history of the fire department.
It began with the death of Tyra Hunter in 1995, a transgender woman who died in a traffic accident. A lawsuit over Hunter’s care included an agreement that the department will institute diversity training. Kenda Kirby was brought in to handle those duties. Kirby herself ended up in a legal dispute with the department claiming she was fired because she is a lesbian.
In a March 5, 2004 article in the Washington Blade, reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. recounted a confrontation between Kirby, her lawyer and Theresa Cusick. Portions of that article are below. The entire article can be found here.
Contacted today, GAP spokesman Dylan Blaylock, does not believe the 2004 incident is relevant to Cusick’s suit and claims against Chief Rubin and members of his command staff. Blaylock makes his case in an email to STATter911.com that you can read here.
A lawyer representing the D.C. fire department yelled at Kenda Kirby, who was hired by the department to increase diversity awareness, during a Feb. 9 fact-finding meeting by the city’s Office of Human Rights into Kirby’s complaint that she was subjected to anti-gay harassment on the job, according to Mindy Daniels, Kirby’s attorney.
Daniels said Theresa Cusick, the D.C. Fire & Emergency Medical Services Department’s general counsel, leapt to her feet, leaned across a conference table toward Kirby, and screamed when she learned that Kirby had named her as a defendant in a discrimination complaint that Kirby filed against the department last September.
Kirby’s complaint charges the department with violating the D.C. Human Rights Act by failing to adequately respond when firefighters posted a series of derogatory messages about Kirby on an Internet site for firefights. The complaint charges department officials with retaliating against Kirby by curtailing her job duties when she reported the discrimination to her supervisors.
“Look at you! Look at you!” Cusick screamed at Kirby, according to Daniels’s account. “How dare you accuse me of anything!” Daniels quoted Cusick as saying.
Kenda Kirby from the Washington Blade.
Daniels said a stunned Kirby sat in silence as Daniels and OHR compliance officer Julio Matta tried to calm Cusick. Cusick continued to shout at Kirby for nearly five minutes, Daniels said, before agreeing to Daniels and Matta’s suggestion to end the meeting and to reschedule it for at another time.
“She was outright abusive and uncivil,” Daniels said. “It was the most unprofessional thing I’ve experienced in over 20 years of practice.”
Cusick, when contacted Wednesday by phone, declined comment.
“I cannot discuss this at all,” she said. “I cannot talk to the press.”
Katherine Friedman, a spokesperson for the department, said the department considers proceedings such as the Feb. 9 OHR meeting to be confidential and never comments on them.
The department hired Kirby, a former volunteer firefighter in Oklahoma, to help run the department’s diversity training program, which covers gay and transgender issues. The department decided not to renew her one-year appointment, which ended last month.
Kirby charges in her complaint that Cusick failed to adequately investigate a series of anonymous, online postings by firefighters on an unofficial firefighters’ Web site that poked fun of Kirby’s appearance. The postings also questioned Kirby’s competency as a consultant for the department’s diversity training program. Someone placed a printed copy of the postings in Kirby’s office mailbox, her complaint says.
One of the postings denounced Kirby for wearing a uniform normally worn by male battalion fire chiefs, calling her “some no-nothing running around dressed like a fireman.” Kirby has said department officials selected the uniform and required her to wear it.
Another posting said, “I thought the dress uniform for women was a skirt!!!”
A third posting criticized Fire Chief Adrian Thompson for hiring as diversity trainers new battalion fire chiefs who “cannot figure out if they are male or female.”
In addition, the complaint says Kirby was informed by a deputy fire chief that department officials had deliberated in private over whether she should be required to use the male or female bathrooms at the time she was hired. The officials eventually decided, “I was not allowed to use the men’s room,” Kirby said in an affidavit accompanying her complaint.
Kirby charges in her complaint that the department’s failure to take adequate steps to identify and reprimand the department employees who wrote the online messages undermined her ability to effectively carry out her job, defamed her character, and caused her to suffer emotional harm.
The complaint says at least one of the postings shows it was sent out on a Fire & EMS Department computer server, indicating that the sender wrote it while at work.
Daniels said Kirby has since amended her complaint against the department to charge Cusick with a count of retaliation for Cusick’s behavior at the Feb. 9 OHR meeting.
“The basis of the complaint is the department acted improperly toward Kenda because of her personal appearance,” Daniels said. “Now you have Cusick shouting ‘Look at you, look at you’ at Kenda. That gets to personal appearance,” Daniels said.
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