A former employee of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office is suing his workplace for wrongful termination—almost six months after he was fired for sending a bizarre and explicit message to his coworkers in an email thread.
Jovan Thomas, a former victim advocate at the DA’s office, was fired in January after he hit “reply all” and sent a sexually explicit email to his entire office—including District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.
In an email thread planning an event commemorating Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and killed in 1998, Thomas sent his coworkers the message: “What color panties you have on.” The exchange was later leaked in photos posted to Twitter.
In the lawsuit filed on Friday, Thomas’s lawyers claimed that the original message was intended for a friend who was burying his father in New Zealand. “Hoping to cheer up his friend, who was distraught and grieving the death of his father, plaintiff intended to text his friend a jokey question of the sort that that plaintiff had sent his friend on occasion in the past.”
The lawsuit describes the comment as a “whimsical comment that was part of plaintiffs standard jocular repertoire,” and claimed the email had “no sexual, off-color, obscene, misogynistic or sexist meaning or intent,” simply intended as a “goofy, non-sequiter.”
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Seconds after the first email, Thomas sent a followup email attempting to explain the remark. “While texting back and forth with my fraternity brother I sent a very inappropriate email. The email was meant as a joke,” Thomas wrote back to the office. He also “sincerely apologize[d]” to his coworkers and said “please know this is not who I am as a person as I carry myself with respect and dignity especially.”
Another followup email from Chief Assistant District Attorney Ana Gonzalez said the “Matter is being handled by the administration” and instructed other employees to delete Thomas’s first message.
Thomas was later fired, the office’s spokesperson Randy Quezada confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle. “This misogynistic behavior violates the office’s code of conduct and the individual has been terminated.”
Now, Thomas is suing Jenkins’ office for wrongful termination. In the lawsuit, first obtained by Courthouse News Service, Thomas’s lawyers argue that when he was fired on the same day the email was sent, he was laid off rather than terminated with cause.
According to the suit, Thomas was told “there would be no disciplinary action attached to plaintiff’s lay-off and that plaintiff would be entitled to re-apply for work for defendants CCSF (City and County of San Francisco) and SFDA.”
Although the message was meant as a text, the lawsuit claims he accidentally wrote it in the form of an email to DA Jenkins, and again accidentally hit “reply all.”
Thomas was also previously sued by one of the victims he was advocating for while working at the Bayview Victims Services, the San Francisco Standard reported after his firing. Thomas’ case was dismissed in December 2021.
In the new lawsuit filed on Friday, Thomas’ attorneys call the case first brought against the former victim advocate “meritless” and that there was “no evidence that plaintiff had engaged in sexual harassment in the workplace or elsewhere in connection” with the victim.
The suit also accuses the office of leaking the contents of the original email to the press, and later pointing reporters to the dismissed sexual harassment case.
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