A jury awarded two office clerks from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department $1 million for their racial discrimination lawsuit filed in 2020.
Danielle Dillard and Kim Lee were awarded the sum by a jury on Nov. 15, according to KQED.
Dillard and Lee claimed in their lawsuit that they were repeatedly subjected to racial slurs and workplace discrimination while working as office clerks for more than 20 years at the SFSD. The jury awarded the women $1,139,400 — Dillard was awarded $523,400, and Lee was awarded $616,000.
Lee and Dillard claimed that after complaining about racial disparities in their work environment, they were told not to bring “that monkey junk” up by a supervisor, according to CBS News. Lee was also instructed not to talk to anyone at work by a supervisor and to “Come to work, do your job, and just leave.”
In March 2019, both women were presented with cease-and-desist orders by their supervisors, preventing them from talking to other people at the SFSD, as well as any other city or county employees. Dillard was reassigned twice prior to the cease-and-desist orders.
“I was just handed a paper, and told to obey those rules,” said Dillard, adding that she was afraid to talk to anyone because she feared she would lose her job and often spent her breaks crying. “For them to tell me I could no longer speak, it bothered me a lot. It tore me down on the inside. It affected my home life. I didn’t know how to explain it to my children. It broke me down. It made me a shell of a person.”
Lee also said being told she couldn’t talk to her work friends caused her to cry at work.
“I’d sometimes cry at my desk because I want to talk to my friends,” said Lee. “Those people were my friends, and I couldn’t talk to my friends.” She also said she was called a “liar,” a “thief” and a “criminal” by white employees of the SFSD.
In 2020, Dillard and Lee filed a lawsuit against the SFSD for violating the Fair Employment and Housing Act. The women’s attorney, Angela Alioto, said the jury handed them “a great victory.”
“It’s such a great victory that this jury saw right through the city’s pretexts and saw the insidious racism that is at different offices throughout the city, but specifically in this case at the sheriff’s office,” said Alioto. “The hatred that is racism has no place in San Francisco.”
