The former division director who said her bosses at the Maine Center for Disease Control ordered her to shred public documents and harassed and retaliated against her when she refused has settled her lawsuit.
Lawyer Cynthia Dill said Tuesday that her clients — former director of the Division of Local Public Health Sharon Leahy-Lind and office manager Katie Woodbury — settled their suit against the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, CDC Director Sheila Pinette, Deputy Director Christine Zukas and Office of Minority Health and Health Equity Director Lisa Sockabasin.
Dill said Tuesday she couldn’t talk about the settlement.
However, last week, Dill said she would seek at least $500,000 each for her two clients, plus attorneys’ fees and lost benefits.
Lawyer Eric Uhl, who represents the Maine Department of Health and Human Services and its CDC, has repeatedly declined to comment on the lawsuit or settlement talks, saying it is department policy not to comment on ongoing litigation.
The settlement ends a two-year public saga involving Leahy-Lind and the CDC.
In April 2013, Leahy-Lind filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission alleging, among other things, that her bosses ordered her to shred public documents related to the funding of the Healthy Maine Partnerships program. They wanted the documents destroyed, she said, to prevent the Sun Journal and the public from seeing them. When she refused, Leahy-Lind said, she was assaulted and harassed.
In July 2013, Leahy-Lind resigned as CDC division director, saying her bosses made it impossible for her to do her job.
In October 2013, Leahy-Lind filed a federal whistle-blower lawsuit against Pinette and DHHS, the state department that oversees the CDC. She said Pinette and others within the department retaliated against her when she refused to destroy documents, publicly defamed her and violated her rights.
In March 2014, the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee spent six hours questioning Leahy-Lind, Pinette, Sockabasin, Zukas and others at the heart of a lengthy CDC document-shredding probe. CDC leaders admitted that employees were told to destroy public documents and that those documents showed scoring was changed at the end of a competitive grant process, sending public money to a favored organization whose original scores didn’t support it.
In September 2014, a judge allowed Woodbury to join Leahy-Lind’s suit as a plaintiff and added Zukas and Sockabasin as defendants. Woodbury said she also faced harassment and retaliation for speaking publicly about problems at the CDC.
In November 2014, the Government Oversight Committee voted to submit legislation to address ethics violations among state employees, a direct result of the CDC document-shredding probe.
The trial to address the federal whistle-blower lawsuit had been slated for September.
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