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May 22, 2009 8:00 pm US/Central
Attorney Suing Former Bosses At Texas AG's Office
Reporting
Jack Fink
DALLAS (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
Imagine your supervisor or boss threatens you, demands you lie, and confines you in a room against your will.
A North Texas woman claims that happened to her.
But what might surprise you is her employer: the state's top law enforcement agency, the Texas Attorney General's office.
Attorney Ginger Weatherspoon is now suing, and spoke with CBS 11.
Weatherspoon claims the Attorney General's office fired her after she says she blew the whistle on two supervisors who allegedly threatened her and demanded her to lie. "I'm very upset, very angry. It was humiliating."
Weatherspoon worked in the child support division since 2006 and in February of last year she says two supervising attorneys demanded she sign an affidavit that falsely accused a Dallas County judge.
She says it happened after the judge ruled against the Attorney General's office in an unrelated case. Weatherspoon says, "I'm an attorney, I'm an officer of the court. That's perjury. I could lose my bar license."
In her lawsuit against the office, Weatherspoon says after she refused to sign the document, the supervising attorneys ordered her to their administrative offices, and confined her in a room against her will. She says, "a senior regional attorney yelled at me, he slammed his fist down, put his finger in my face, and told me that General Abbott himself was waiting on that affidavit, and I refused to sign the affidavit."
Weatherspoon's attorney, Steve Kardell, who also teaches at SMU's Dedman School of Law, says, "You obviously have situations where people are asked to do things which push the envelope a little bit, but you rarely see a situation where a lawyer is held hostage in order to accomplish that."
Weatherspoon says the Attorney General's office retaliated against her by firing her last November. She says, "I was handed a letter and was told it was for poor customer service."
In a statement, the Attorney General's Communications Director Jerry Strickland says "the dismissal of this employee is wholly unrelated to any of those incidents and was precipitated by facts separate from anything to do with that review."
The state says the two supervising attorneys who made the alleged threats against Weatherspoon and another supervisor have all been demoted.
As for Weatherspoon, she's opened her own law practice, but says the transition hasn't been easy. "To lose your job and to lose your income, it's been very difficult."
She's seeking lost wages and attorneys fees. And doesn't want others to have to go through the same ordeal.
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