EEOC Finds Retaliation in NCCU Case: A Sexual Harassment Complaint By an Officer Led to Her Ouster, the Agency Concludes

By Anne Blythe, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Oct. 27–DURHAM — A female police officer at N.C. Central University who was forced to resign after lodging a sexual harassment complaint was a victim of retaliation and a sexually hostile work environment, a federal employment investigation has found.

Cinnamon Forrest, who was employed by the NCCU campus police department for nearly eight months in 2005, started crying, she said, after receiving the finding from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Forrest said this week.

The determination opens the door for a possible lawsuit against a university police department that has struggled with harassment complaints for years.

For nearly two years, Forrest tried to persuade NCCU administrators and others that she was the victim of unwanted sexual touching and comments of a sexual nature from a male co-worker.

She complained to her police department superiors and eventually went up the university command chain as far as then-Chancellor James Ammons.

Top campus officials, Forrest said, kept sending her back to the police department to try to work out her problems.

But Forrest said her superiors began to retaliate against her for filing a complaint. The stress started getting to her, she said, and she took a medical leave.

“I thought I could take it, I thought I could be tough,” Forrest said. “But I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Forrest said she quit under great duress. The EEOC investigation determined that NCCU and its campus police department “failed to exercise reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly the sexual harassing behavior.”

The finding was issued by Thomas M. Colclough, director of the Raleigh EEOC office, on Sept. 5.

Cressie Thigpen, chairman of the NCCU trustees, said Friday he was not aware of the investigation results, but he said he would look into the matter.

“This is something we take very seriously,” Thigpen said. “Those things ought not to happen.”

But Scott Holmes, the Durham lawyer who represented Forrest, said the sexual harassment complaints were a “systemic problem” that NCCU did not seriously address.

“This is another incidence where a federal agency has investigated [N.C.] Central and found discrimination again,” he said.

In the late 1990s, the university hired an outside investigator to look into complaints about McDonald Vick, chief of campus police for 11 years. More than a dozen female employees were fired or quit in a two-year span during his tenure.

Although that investigation exonerated the chief, a lawsuit that was settled this year with another former NCCU female officer showed the former chief in a different light.

In a deposition taken for the suit filed by Renna Deonna Hooper, Vick acknowledged that he had an intimate relationship with an officer who accused him of sexual harassment. The deposition said he also admitted paying her $25,000 from his personal account to settle her complaint before a hearing on her allegations.

Since those allegations and the settlement, NCCU has a new police chief and a new chancellor.

“It’s a difficult issue for an institution with a reputation and commitment to civil rights to allow this kind of pattern to tarnish their reputation,” Holmes said. “It’s hypocritical.”

Forrest said NCCU had approached her since the EEOC finding with a settlement offer, which she declined.

“They didn’t even offer me lost wages,” Forrest said.

After resigning under pressure on Dec. 12, 2005, Forrest lost her police certification, she said.

Now she does computer work in Research Triangle Park. She has given up on her dream of becoming a police officer, but she plans to seek more from NCCU.

“I’m not money-hungry,” Forrest said. “I’ve already lost my job. But what they offered me, that was another slap in the face.”

anne.blythe@newsobserver.com or (919) 932-8741

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