By Kathy Adams
The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK, Va. — In 2005, Cassandra Lee’s career was on the rise.
After 15 years in the Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office, she had risen to the rank of captain - the first black woman to do so - and had become the first woman to head the department’s corrections division, which runs the jail.
In the newspaper, her superiors sang her praises. She was firm, but fair, they said, a person whom they counted on to fix problems.
Within five years Lee would fall from grace, losing her job in December 2009. She was just five months short of retirement.
Now she has filed a $10 million federal discrimination lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Office and several deputies, claiming she was treated differently and ultimately let go because of her race and gender.
The lawsuit also names as defendants Sheriff Ken Stolle, who took office on Jan. 1, 2010, and former Sheriff Paul Lanteigne, who held the post from 2000 to 2009.
Stolle denies her claims. Lanteigne did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Sheriff’s offices are constitutional offices, and their employees serve at the pleasure of the sheriff. Each new officeholder must reappoint employees on the existing payroll or hire new staff.
When Stolle took office, he kept all of the roughly 550 appointees, except Lee, he said. The reason, he said: She refused to work with two of the chief deputies.
“I did not feel that she supported my beliefs on how the Sheriff’s Office should be run,” he said. “She was not going to be a good influence on the deputies there, and so I decided not to appoint her.”
“I feel bad that she didn’t get her retirement,” he added, “but she never worked for me.”
According to the lawsuit, Lee said she began to experience discrimination from her superiors - mostly white males - in early 2009 after she complained to former Sheriff Lanteigne about their favoring certain deputies and allowing paperwork to go missing.
Afterward, she was transferred to another division, ordered to do clerical work and stripped of staff, she says in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Norfolk. She was also relieved of outside assignments, including the Crisis Intervention Team she had helped start, the lawsuit says.
Lee eventually filed a discrimination and retaliation complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found sufficient evidence to support her claims, according to an April 2012 letter. The Department of Justice declined to pursue the matter in court, according to a November letter.
Before she lost her job, Lee and her family were already struggling, she said, in part because of medical expenses, and were trying to refinance their home.
After she lost her job, they fell behind on their mortgage and had to surrender their home to the bank to avoid foreclosure, Lee said.
They had to put their belongings in storage, surrender their two dogs to a shelter and move in with family. When they couldn’t pay the rent on their storage unit, they lost everything inside, she said.
Lee said she applied for or inquired about jobs at several jails in Hampton Roads and in California, where she had moved before returning recently to Virginia Beach, to no avail.
She’s been unemployed ever since.
She received a supplemental retirement payment for deputies, but not her full law enforcement retirement because she was five months short of 20 years, Lee said. Her salary had been more than $70,000, she said.
“We lost everything,” she said. “It’s been rough.”
In addition to damages, Lee is seeking back pay and changes to the Sheriff’s Office’s policy on handling complaints about command staff.
She filed the lawsuit pro se, without an attorney.