Chapter Eight

“…kind of heated and emotional for me because to have people— you know, if I treated people in law enforcement, and if I lied like that— and to have [police officers] say…‘We never saw that slip from that doctor.’ I mean to go all the way and to say that’s your defense?”

SG: “It wasn’t anything big. It was $100,000. But, you know, obviously [one third of] it goes for the attorney…and like my attorney said if I hadn’t quit and I had just sat, it could have been more. But it cost the City more than $100,000.”

LBN:…”Did you think it was fair?”

SG: “Well you know what, I didn’t want any money. I wanted my job back. I didn’t want the money. I wanted my job back. And I actually, to be completely honest with you, cried and left and felt like I lost because it wasn’t about the money.”

“I was working for a vet, as a vet assistant. It was my vet, he needed a person and I was working for like $8.00 an hour…And that’s another part of this whole process. Here you are in your own hometown that they’ve seen you in all the schools and the whole thing, and the next time I’m no longer a police officer. My stuff hits the paper. I’m working at my vet holding people’s dogs you know and having people go, “What are you doing?” and they don’t realize I have to make a living. I have to make a living. I have to do something!…The one savior for me is my work in the schools, and I was able to work as a dean’s assistant and things like that in the high school because of my reputation at least with the school district.”

“We got this new fellow in. Steve…was fairly young; he was like barely in his thirties, I think. And for some reason or another, he and I just locked horns right off the bat…It was like he didn’t know what I was doing, and I did know what I was doing. And I didn’t need his input that he was giving me.”

“Everybody else that had been put in that position [the company] had sent to Detroit for, to be educated on it, you know. The [other workers] knew what they were doing.”

“I didn’t mince any words. In fact, I was sort of glad that my boss was there. He got his ear, he couldn’t say anything. So I had the floor, so to speak, you know, and that made me feel good, to get it off my chest, because as long as he was my boss at work, I didn’t feel at liberty to tell him exactly what I thought.”

“I was tired, I was sick, I had just had it. I had enough of it. So I took the [settlement]. They offered $15,000 and he got a third, so what did I get out of it?”

“I think settlement or not is based on an assessment of risk and costs…If there’s a lot of risk in a case, we’re going to be much more likely to settle. If the operating people or legal had done the same things in a…case that presented no risk, you wouldn’t settle.”

MH: “Well, sometimes I don’t agree with the change of goals, but it’s not my decision…Why do they change motivations? Probably the most common reason is money. You know, they’re spending a lot of money on defending the case, and they’re saying, ‘I just don’t think it’s worth it anymore. Make it go away’…The anger that they had about the case when it was first filed has evaporated…They just want to make it go away.”

I: “They get tired.”

MH:: “But mostly they get tired of spending the money. They get tired of the fight. [Or] sometimes it’s a change internally. There’ll be a change within the company.”

“They feel horrible no matter what happens. . . . Never vindicated. The only time maybe is when some large company is splitting the bill with an individual manager. [Then, the leadership] feels that they’ve been vindicated.” Even then, she remarked, the worry is that “somehow the company is going to hold it against me. I cost them this money. . . . We’ve had some great wins for clients, and they still are kind of like, ‘Thanks, big huge bill.’”

“Clients never say, ‘Well, I’m glad you lost for less money,’ you know. So you have to sort of dot the I’s and cross the T’s, and you may be able to make some strategic, you know, things that we could have done more or you could do less (if less is enough), but, boy, that’s a difficult call to make.”

“What they did to me was illegal. I didn’t care about the money. I wanted my job. I had it for twelve and a half years. [When I lost that job] I lost my retirement, I lost my life insurance. And I had worked hard.”

“I was hoping, by the way that me and my husband approached this, that they would actually have compassion and realize that we are not out trying to be mean, vindictive people. We are good people trying to support a family and just want to keep our jobs and do it well.”

“I was going on fifty years old…I don’t know where they thought I was going to get another job, but like I say, they should have paid me at least up to my retirement age…I did not get punitive damages, and I did not get the job back.”

“But I still, one of the finest things I feel is that even the American [Disease] Association president called me to thank me. [He said], ‘You’ve really helped [people with the disability] in the future, I want to thank you for all the work that you’ve done.’ ”

“I didn’t want to tear people up like that, and I knew they’d try to tear me up. It was so unpleasant, it was just so unpleasant, and I think that’s in the end why I did take the settlement. [My] attorney really wanted me to take it. He put a lot of pressure on me to take it.”

“No. I told him no. I told him no, I didn’t want to do that, but my home had went into foreclosure and I was behind in my bills and stuff…I really got the bitter end. I won, but sometimes you win, you lose.”

“[A] really shitty feeling…because I thought the case was worth a whole lot more…like a half a mil…I was treated unfairly, and to get $25,000, I mean, you know, that’s about…four or five months of wages for me…But, I mean, I got what I needed and I won…That’s the bottom line. They paid me; I didn’t pay them. And they spent an awful lot of money defending themselves. [My attorney] heard up to like $750,000, $800,000.”

“I probably would not have taken it, only because…I’m not, nor was I, money hungry. I wasn’t a person like that. I was just thinking that it is an insult to, you know, demean me and tell me that ‘You stink. You’re out of here.’ Just like that, when I sacrificed to drive up here for three months. I didn’t even have to work, period. I could have just stayed home and just been sick.”

“The trial vindicated me. Well, the process from where I started representing myself to the end of the trial vindicated me, as far as I was concerned. [The judge] made an open apology of what happened [earlier in the case]…And believe you me, [when] I see her today, I hug her. She saved my life, because that really picked me up out of the dumps. It really did. It gave me motivation and courage.”

“As someone who is very proud of a public service career, I did not feel comfortable with this individual being in a leadership role in a city that, in any city, but one that I was proud of and one that I was associated with and my city that I lived in…Basically, I think he was a golfing buddy of the city manager, and until the city manager was going to leave, he wasn’t going to probably leave, and all that stuff was well out of my control.”

“I think the main thing I felt was I felt betrayed. I felt betrayed by the fact that I spent twenty years with an organization, and yet this is the way they’re treating me. They’re tossing me out and saying, ‘Hey, you’re no good anymore.’ And the people they were bringing in just didn’t have the knowledge, ability or the talent…I felt really angry at the same time knowing full well that, you know, I spent a lot of time away from my family, I spent a lot of time traveling, I spent a lot of time, you know, sitting in an empty airport waiting for the plane to come to get to the next meeting or get to the next sales conference.”

“I was like paranoid of everybody, I felt like I couldn’t trust nobody. My wife was white, so I felt like white people was against me, and I couldn’t trust her because her attitude was, ‘Why are you having these problems at work?…People are not racist against you…You should be going to work and make this money and bring this money home. You have a good job. You are a blessed black man”…I was trying to tell her, you know, ‘These white people are, like, prejudiced against me, and how they treat me at work and these things that happen.’ And she was saying, ‘Just forget it.’ Forget it? She didn’t understand, so I became hostile toward her.”

I: “When you think back about this period in your life now, what kind of strain, if any, did it put on, did this process put on you and your family, and how did you deal with it?

PLAINTIFF: [pause] “It was easy; I guess it was easy to drink.” [laughing]

“Thank God, my husband was able to get a hold of himself. ’Cause he went through a drinking thing. I mean it was depression. I mean, a man that has been working and taking care of his family and then all of a sudden, health-wise, and a whole bunch of things are against him.”

“I should have quit really…It was a terribly abusive environment, but I’m not a quitter. I ultimately won…Not a lot, but I won. [And yet there was a] toll on my marriage and my migraines and my body. I had Bell’s Palsy and I had pneumonia and I had toxic hepatitis. I mean my body was crying out, and I hospitalized myself twice for depression. I was really suicidal. It was horrible.”

“I also kept a second job. We got five kids; you got to have a second job. And so I just started doing more security, and then met this guy who was an iron worker, and they make very good money…And so I took that job, and within two days I tore my knee up and tore some ligaments in my back. So I’ve been on disability since then. This whole experience caused my wife and I to fight all the time. I didn’t spend as much time with my children, because I was sullen a lot. Eventually…they put me off on medical leave, a doctor did. And they started giving me depression medicine. And it just broke me down. I’m still…I’ve been trying to figure out— excuse me, I get emotional sometimes [crying]…I couldn’t believe they’d done this stuff to me. When you tell people, they don’t believe you. They look at you like, ‘Well, what did you do?’ I said, ‘I showed up for work!’ [laughs] But…they wanted to fire me…So it’s just like, you just want me to die.”

“No, it didn’t, because I was always taught that Christ and God watch over…I was drafted and went to Vietnam, and this shoulder here was tore off, my friend died in my arms, and all of the stuff I went through, even the discrimination over there…These kind of things? That lawsuit? That was nothing. Emotional, no.”

“It’s probably been ten years since I even talked about it. I have a sometimes decent relationship with my wife now. I can talk to her, you know, I talk to my kids, and I try to put closure to it. She’s like, ‘Well, that’s gone, and the money is all gone, so don’t even talk to me about it now.’ So, then, for a long time, but I was getting beyond that, you know, and I got like some really nice daughters, you know. I have two of the greatest daughters in the world, you know. When I look back at it, it was worth it, just for them.”