By Mike Hendricks
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A 61-year-old Kansas City firefighter and paramedic says she was subjected to years of mistreatment and abuse from male co-workers and her superiors because she was a woman, a lesbian and older than most of her peers when she graduated from the fire academy at age 40.
They questioned her authority and demeaned her, she said. But perhaps the most disgusting incident was when one of those men allegedly peed on things in her office while she was away and was later arrested for it.
She sued. And on Tuesday, the City Council’s finance committee is set to approve a record $1.3 million settlement to compensate Rebecca Reynolds for those years of abuse.
Should the full council approve the payment on Thursday as recommended by the city’s law department, Reynolds will drop two pending lawsuits alleging discrimination based on her gender, sexual orientation and age. Plus she will promise not to file a third suit based on the incident in which a firefighter allegedly urinated on things in her office while she was on extended medical leave.
The firefighter alleged to have done that, Pleaze Robinson III, was charged in April with felony charges in connection with that 2023 incident. Police tied him to the crime through his DNA.
The Missouri Commission on Human Right recently granted Reynolds permission to sue the city for someone soiling her books and other possessions in urine, according to her attorney, Bert Braud of the Popham Law Firm.
The other suits were filed in 2023 and 2024 and were heading toward trial.
“They didn’t really have much of a choice but to get this resolved,” Braud said.
Millions in settlements
The settlement is the largest the city has ever agreed to in a discrimination case involving the fire department. The Star’s 2020 investigation of racial and sexual harassment within KCFD found that the city had paid out $2.5 million in judgments, attorney fees and court costs for those cases during the preceding 20 years.
With this settlement, fire department claims over the last two years alone will exceed that total, costing taxpayers $2.8 million. Last October, the city spent $800,000 to settle a suit filed by Brenda Paikowski, an assistant division chief who claimed she had been subjected to ongoing harassment for three years.
In August, the council agreed to pay two white battalion chiefs — Mark Little and Christopher McDaniel — $350,000 each after they alleged they were denied promotion for a position that was filled by a Black co-worker with fewer qualifications.
A lawsuit filed by a third man making an identical claim has not been resolved. He has since retired, but Daniel McGrath’s case remains pending in Jackson County Circuit Court.
Reynolds was 40 when she graduated from the Kansas City Fire Academy and, according to court documents, has long endured “abusive conduct” because of her age, gender and sexual orientation.
“Plaintiff has been screamed at by superiors, who have told her, among other things, that she was ‘not normal’ because of her sexual orientation,” according to the litigation.
In court documents, Reynolds alleges numerous incidents in which male co-workers demeaned her or challenged her authority on emergency calls, using foul language in front of patients and other witnesses.
“That’s why they shouldn’t hire old people,” one of them allegedly said while challenging her decision on how to set up her equipment as a medic working a Chiefs game in 2022.
Reynolds has worked at a number of fire stations during her career. In August of 2023, was assigned to the one at Kansas City International Airport, where she had converted a storage room into a small office.
When she returned to work after an extended leave due to an injury, Reynolds smelled a foul odor in the room and discovered that someone had urinated on her training books, compact discs and a compact disc player, among other things, according to a police probable cause statement.
When police asked who might have done it, Reynolds said she’d had issues with two co-workers, one of whom was Robinson. The police crime lab determined that his DNA matched that in the urine.
Based on The Star’s 2020 series, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation of the fire department’s practices of hiring and promoting Black firefighters.
The government has in the past declined to comment on that probe, which the city was informed of in July 2021. It was ongoing as of this summer, according to a former firefighter who said he was interviewed for the fourth time about three months ago.
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