Jury awards $2.25 million to Riverside County sergeant forced to resign after reporting harassment
Riverside County was ordered to pay $2.25 million to a former sergeant who said he was pressured into early retirement in retaliation after reporting workplace harassment from a superior.
Sgt. Frank Lodes was forced to leave the job he loved in 2022 — writing a resignation letter in a Del Taco parking lot — while a top department official threatened him with escalating investigations, according to the complaint. On Tuesday, a civil jury found that Lodes resigned involuntarily due to his report of a hostile workplace and was awarded a multimillion-dollar award to compensate for his emotional damages.
Lodes’ lawyer, Bijan Darvish, said the award was a “significant figure” that adequately represents the harm inflicted on Lodes, noting that the period since his forced retirement has been the “darkest four years” of Lodes’ life.
He said his client did not wish to comment on the verdict because discussing the events remained painful. The sheriff’s department and the county did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being a cop was his life; he lived it and breathed it 24/7,” Darvish said. “It was his whole identity, and that’s why it was so hard for him to take it away.”
The jury award comes amid a rare wide-open gubernatorial race that includes Sheriff’s Department Chief Chad Bianco, who is a leading GOP contender for the seat. Bianco has staked his campaign on his long career in law enforcement, spanning more than three decades, including serving as Riverside County’s elected sheriff since 2019.
Although top officials in the Sheriff’s Department were involved in Lodes’ case, Darvish said no evidence was presented at trial that Bianco had direct knowledge of his client’s mistreatment. Bianco was not a defendant in the lawsuit. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Darvish contends the affair demonstrates a departmental culture of covering up allegations of misconduct.
“When a harassment complaint is filed against the captain and they never investigated and they pressure someone to resign and withdraw the complaint,” he said, “then that’s a systemic problem.” »
The retaliation began after Lodes, a 25-year veteran of the department, formally reported workplace harassment to human resources in March 2022, according to the complaint.
Lodes had been called mentally ill in front of his peers by a captain during a promotion meeting around October 2021. A few months later, he found degrading posters of his head on the body of a child slipped into the pockets of his uniform and into his gun holster and plastered on the walls of the station, according to the complaint.
The department responded to his report of harassment by opening an investigation into Lodes’ illegal use of informants and threatening him with possible criminal charges, according to Darvish.
The jury agreed that these allegations were a fabricated excuse to cover up illegal retaliation.
A few days after the workplace harassment complaint was filed, an Internal Affairs sergeant packed Lodes’ personal belongings in a box and drove them to his home, according to the complaint. The sergeant spent hours pressuring Lodes, then 47, to accept early retirement.
The next day, Lodes was asked to meet with a high-ranking Sheriff’s Department official in a Del Taco parking lot who asked him to resign immediately and withdraw his harassment complaint.
The $2.25 million award in the civil case will come from county coffers.
The award casts new scrutiny on the Bianco Sheriff’s Department two weeks before primary election ballots arrive in Californians’ mailboxes.
He also came under the spotlight in March after seizing more than 650,000 ballots from the November election as part of an investigation into whether they had been fraudulently counted. He suspended the investigation shortly before the California Supreme Court halted it pending further review.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
