To judge only by published accounts (there weren’t any), not much happened this week in the continuing aftermath of the state Senate firing of three veteran Senate Media Services employees in mid-August (see “Capitol Chronicle: The Senate’s Witch Burning,” Sept. 14). As we reported last week, the three employees, Katherine Staat, Barbara Schlief, and Shelley Smith, all supervisors within the department, were fired Aug. 9 for what Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff described as “apparent harassment, apparent abusive language, and unprofessional language and conduct.” Ratliff says the termination decisions were based upon an internal Senate report of an investigation that he said established that office management was “in disarray.”
The report, released recently in redacted form (with names deleted), was in fact the result of a Senate Human Resources investigation of one female employee’s sexual harassment complaint against one or all of the three fired supervisors (all three managers are gay women; Schlief and Smith are partners). It is a compilation of management summaries of interviews done with various current and former employees — and makes little or no distinction between rumors, allegations, hearsay, and demonstrable facts, or between the sexual harassment allegations and miscellaneous job complaints concerning authoritarian management or other unrelated matters. The Lt. Governor’s office and Senate management have thus far refused further comment.
Staat, director of Media Services since 1982, has asked Austin attorney Karl Bayer to act on her behalf. Bayer says he hopes to resolve the matter through mediation, and that he has had some private supportive inquiries from both Democratic and Republican Senators. He adds that he has been in touch with the Attorney General’s office about Staat’s situation. Assistant AG Robert O’Keefe confirms that he is looking into the matter, but referred further questions to the AG’s press office, which had not responded at press time.
Dianne Hardy-Garcia of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas says she is concerned about the firings, especially if they were motivated in any way by anti-gay prejudice. For LGRL to consider the matter formally, her office would have to receive a request from the dismissed staffers, which has not yet happened. “They have not requested help,” Hardy-Garcia says. “It may be that their interests are better served by going about this in a legal way. So until they request help, there isn’t much we can do directly.”
Schlief, a Senate photographer since 1979, says she hasn’t yet decided what to do. (Smith declined to comment.) Schlief says she had only received her copy of the report last week, and that in the wake of the bombing news out of New York and Washington, D.C., she hasn’t had much time to consider her own predicament. “My situation hasn’t changed,” Schlief says. “I’m trying to file for unemployment [compensation], but I’ve got no definite plan. I’m a photographer by trade, and I’m trying to figure out where I stand … I know what the articles have said what happened — but what assault on my reputation is being made, that I just don’t know. … The questions in mind are for my family — what to do about my life and finances. I don’t know if fighting this will just prolong what has already been a painful thing.”
Schlief has read the report, and described it as composed generally of “lies and half-truths, basically. Things [like workplace arguments] are framed in sort of reality, but there are so many just blatantly obvious things that were angry kind of spats — it’s hard to know what to think.” Schlief notes of the summarized interviews, “Those are not sworn depositions — so they could say anything they wanted without fear of any contradiction. …”
“There are so many things that are still so odd” about the report, Schlief adds. “I come with a great deal of experience with the Senate: 221/2 years, and I was very much involved and a part of the place.” She says that even on its face, the report is inaccurate — “It’s dated Aug. 1, but I wasn’t interviewed until Aug. 6” — and that at best shows there were serious allegations that “probably should have merited an external investigation … the Human Resources staff are located right at the other end of the hall from Media, and they go to lunch together every day. Even if it had been on another floor, it would have been different.”
Austin Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, who told the Chronicle earlier this month that he was looking into the matter, was traveling last week and unavailable for comment. But before the Human Resources report was released, he told a reporter, “We [the Senators] were there every single day, for many years. If these people were such bad managers, there should have been some sign of it. There were none.”
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.
