I Reported Sexual Harassment by My Boss. A Week Later, I Was Suspended.

What happens next will shape the fate of police accountability in Rochester.

In the wake of Daniel Prude’s death in 2020, Rochester’s Police Accountability Board hired me as its Executive Director. Over the next year and a half, the PAB grew from a fledgling idea into a functioning government agency. In months, we built a cutting-edge police watchdog organization from scratch — complete with over 30 amazing and trained staff, a new furnished office space, and rules that will set the gold standard for investigating allegations of police misconduct.

On May 12, we finalized a plan to start accepting reports of police misconduct within three days. Hours later, PAB’s Board members voted to suspend me. Today, the agency has yet to accept complaints, and I have yet to be given any reason for my suspension.

I am proud of the work the PAB has done and has continued to do in my absence. However, I fear all this work will be undone if I do not tell my story. I believe I was suspended in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment I experienced at the hands of my boss: PAB’s Chair, Shani Wilson.

After Learning About My Sexual Orientation, My Boss Repeatedly Propositioned Me and Punished Me for Rejecting Her Advances

Shani began sexually harassing me days after I started this job. On October 22, 2020, after learning I was bisexual, she told me I was a “unicorn” and that she found me attractive. Weeks later, on November 20, she came to my house at night, attempted to get me inebriated (I do not drink), told me she had feelings for me, and asked me to sleep with her. When I rejected her repeated advances, Shani used the power she holds over me at the PAB to punish me.

In many ways, the retaliation and harassment I faced was standard for people who resist their boss’s advances. Shani humiliated and ridiculed me at work. She hugged and touched me without my consent. She told me intimate details about the sex lives of mutual friends and spread rumors about my sexual preferences with others. Whenever I tried to draw boundaries and maintain a professional relationship, Shani would threaten me for not “acting like her friend” while reminding me of her romantic feelings toward me. What made this particularly awful, however, was the way it worked to exploit or distort my sexual orientation — for example, when Shani ordered me to end a romantic relationship I had with a woman while encouraging me to date men.

I did not speak publicly about it because I knew what happens when victims speak out about abuse at the hands of the politically connected. My harasser is close friends with city councilmembers, county legislators, state legislators, city bureaucrats, and even some of my employees. She serves on several boards and task forces that have brought her close to many other local power players, from nonprofit executives to leading journalists to the mayor. Most importantly, she has close relationships with many people in Rochester’s activist and faith communities. I believed that, if I spoke out, Shani would use these connections to launch a campaign to discredit my story and end my career. But I did tell my family about Shani’s first sexual advance in the days after it happened, reported the harassment to my therapist throughout the last year, and confided in my best friend that my boss had made unwanted sexual advances.

This April, I reached a breaking point. I saw how Shani’s abuse of power was extending beyond me. Her bullying and unethical behavior contributed to the resignation of two of our most important Board members, Dr. Celia McIntosh and Ida Perez. Then, in late March, Shani ordered me not to discipline an employee credibly accused of misconduct — an employee whom Shani had previously urged me to hire and promote. When I told Shani I would not obey this unethical order, she threatened to get me in trouble with the Board.

Most importantly, we were getting close to hiring an employee who would work directly with Shani. I worried that, if I did not speak up, someone I was tasked with protecting would be subject to the same harassment I had experienced. I felt I had no choice but to disclose Shani’s treatment of me to the Board.

When I Decided to Report this Harassment, My Boss Launched a Campaign to Discredit My Story and Destroy My Reputation

On April 19, 2022, I told Shani that I would be reporting the sexual harassment I had experienced to the PAB Board in keeping with the City’s sexual harassment and whistleblowing policies. Shani responded by telling me: “I’m going to hurt you because you hurt me.” I was so shocked by this statement that I wrote it down on a notepad shortly afterward.

On April 28, with no notice to the public or anyone else, Shani held a secret Board Meeting where she told Board members that I was having what she called “performance” issues. The next day, I received an email from a handful of my staff asking me to discuss these issues. These concerns focused on organizational issues within the agency, like a lack of communication and concerns about micromanagement. Nothing raised in the email or my subsequent conversations with staff to address those issues had anything to do with discrimination or harassment. To date, I am not aware of any such allegations against me.

The same day that I received that email, I learned that Shani contacted PAB Board members and asked them to hold an emergency meeting to discuss my “performance” issues. Over the next week, Shani held at least two secret meetings to discuss my work. A Board member recently admitted to me that there are no minutes or records of any of these so-called “retreats” and “listening sessions.”

On Thursday, May 5, I met with the PAB Board and gave them a detailed report about both Shani’s sexual harassment of me and her inappropriate order directing me not to discipline her friend. As I did so, Shani laughed and tried to stop me from speaking. I had hoped that other Board members would protect me as their employee. Instead, a Board member said they wished I had not brought a “personal issue” to the Board’s attention.

Fearing the Board would not take my report seriously, I filed a formal complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights. I also informed the PAB’s associate general counsel of the harassment.

It is my understanding that, instead of keeping my report confidential, Shani has disclosed it to city councilmembers, the mayor, and many community leaders. In doing so, she minimized my claims, asked people to not believe them, and framed me as incompetent.

A Week After Hearing My Report, the Board Suspended Me for Unknown Reasons

Meanwhile, I got back to work with my team at the PAB. We moved forward with a plan to open our doors to accept reports of police misconduct on Wednesday, May 18. Just before I left the office on the night of Thursday, May 12, I sent a letter to the PAB Board and RPD, which, in addition to requesting information from RPD, informed them that the PAB would be accepting reports of misconduct in the coming days.

A few hours after sending that letter, I got a knock at the door of my home. It was the City’s security team. They handed me a letter informing me that I was suspended and banned from speaking to my employees or entering my office. The letter did not say why I was suspended or how long the suspension would last.

To this day, I have not been told why I am suspended. (When I called City Council’s Chief of Staff to ask the reason behind my suspension, he said: “I don’t think it’s been defined.”) Nor have I heard from the person that City Council hired weeks ago to investigate me.

Over the last few weeks, Board members have called to tell me what they think is going on. One said that, until I filed my sexual harassment claim, I wasn’t going to be in trouble. Another said that what was happening to me was the result of a few Board members’ “love” for Shani. As one Board member told me, “Honestly, this is not your fault.”

The irony of all this is that, while building the PAB, I established a culture that encouraged staff to speak up about misconduct they witnessed on the job. For example, in late 2021, I filed a complaint on behalf of my employees with the State’s labor department over the City Human Resources Department’s illegal hiring practices. This spring, I encouraged one of my employees to file a complaint with the New York Division of Human Rights over retaliation they were experiencing for addressing misconduct by the City’s Law Department. In May, I told another of my employees to do the same in the wake of sexual harassment they were experiencing at the hands of other City employees. The Democrat & Chronicle’s recent report of two other DHR complaints involving PAB personnel could very well be these complaints I encouraged my colleagues to file.

If Left Unaddressed, the Harassment and Retaliation I Experienced May Prove Fatal to PAB

What is happening to me is as unsurprising as it is troubling. As we have learned since the start of the #MeToo movement, this is the price too many people pay when they speak up about sexual harassment by powerful individuals. #MeToo has also taught us that, despite whatever progress we’ve made, our culture still clings to false narratives about victims of sexual harassment. As one Board member told me, people do not believe I was sexually harassed because they have seen me “socializing” with Shani.

The campaign to discredit my story, silence my voice, and destroy my reputation has been a living hell for me. The trauma of the harassment I experienced over the last two years has been compounded by the gaslighting and public humiliation I have been forced to endure these last few weeks. Worse yet, thanks to being outed without my permission, this has jeopardized my ability to navigate our biphobic world safely and on my own terms.

However, what I have had to endure personally pales in comparison to the tragedy this is for my staff, RPD employees, and our community.

This is a tragedy for the PAB staff because it suggests our agency is overseen by individuals who care more about their own reputations and protecting their friends from being held accountable for misconduct than they do about their employees. The PAB should not be a place where a Board member can intervene to stop an investigation into their buddy who is harming other employees. Nor should it be a place where, in response to a request to remove an alleged sexual harasser from positions of power in the agency, Board members empower the harasser to have even more contact with staff. My team has sacrificed their careers and their reputations to work at the PAB. They should not be forced to risk their safety, too.

This is a tragedy for every person working for RPD who is desperate to address the misconduct they see and suffer from coworkers. In a world where neither RPD brass nor the police union can be trusted to investigate their own, PAB exists to give police officers and staff a safe, effective way to file reports and obtain fair investigations. But RPD employees must wait for justice until they can be sure every single PAB Board member will not leak complaints, discredit whistleblowers, or downplay serious misconduct like sexual harassment.

Finally — and most importantly — this is a tragedy for our community. I know because I was born and raised here. Like too many Rochesterians, I have lost friends and family to the brokenness of our existing policing system. We all hope that people like Denise Hawkins, Alicia McCuller, Calvin Green, Craig Heard, and Daniel Prude did not die in vain. This hope led an overwhelming majority of Rochesterians to vote for an independent, community-led PAB dedicated to creating transparency, delivering accountability, and ending misconduct.

It would be a tragedy for this collective hope to be perverted for the sake of individual self-interest. The PAB is supposed to work in public, not behind closed doors. We are supposed to create transparency in government, not participate in cover-ups. We are supposed to make the powerful face accountability, not shield them from it. We are supposed to safeguard our independence from City Hall, not exchange that freedom for political protection. It is heartbreaking to see our agency threatened by the very culture of corruption the PAB was created to end.

Our Community Needs an Effective, Ethical, and Transparent PAB

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the PAB is worth fighting for. It remains the catalyst for the fundamental, community-led change that our public safety system so desperately needs. Almost everyone involved in the PAB’s work is still trying to build the agency our community deserves. But if a handful of powerful people keep the PAB on its current path, the agency will do little more than perpetuate the status quo.

Still, we should not lose faith. I can’t count the number of times that the PAB has been counted out and left for dead. Nor can I count the number of times our community has stood up and fought for the PAB it deserves. I know how tiring that fight can be, how impossible it can feel — especially when it is led by regular people, rather than those with power. But I also know the energy that comes from being this close to having the PAB that generations of Rochesterians have fought for.

I have faith in the community’s ability to get us back to where we need to be. So should you.