Sexual Discrimination in Chesterfield

An individual who once worked as a department head for the Chesterfield County area has recently chosen to seek out a separation agreement from several other county officials, which comes along with part of the sexual discrimination lawsuit that the woman has filed against Chesterfield County. The former department head, Karla Gerner, has made allegations against several other county officials in a lawsuit. In the lawsuit, she claims that she was not treated fairly and received termination from her position because of the fact that she is a female and not a man. Gerner also has made claims that when she received information in December of 2009, she was told that her position was going to be eliminated due to the reorganization process but although it was going to happen, she did not receive an offering of a severance package, which is something that the male county officials did receive.

In the meantime, the attorney who is representing Gerner, Mark D. Dix, has made requests to find out more about the severance packages that would have been provided to several of the county officials, including Millard D. Stith Jr., Paul Patten, Thomas Taylor and Thomas Jacobson. Dix has made it clear that he feels his client has been discriminated on based on her sex. Dix said, “We believe that Ms. Gerner is entitled to discover the terms of any severance agreement that may have been entered into with these four gentlemen.” He has also said, “Ms. Gerner was in a position where she was intimately familiar with the deals that were being negotiated. This is not a mere fishing expedition.” The county continues to decline when it comes to providing the information on these employees, claiming that the information contains a number of personnel files and that releasing such information would be in violation of the Freedom of Information Act for the state of Virginia.

Gerner was working for the country for nearly three decades and was serving as the head of the human resources department for over a decade. Due to the discrimination, she is now seeking to receive $1.1 million from the lawsuit that she has filed against the county. In the meantime, an attorney for the county has declined to make any comments on the pending litigation, since that is the specific practice in the first place. In the meantime, Gerner is saying that because of her termination, she was unable to be eligible for full retirement, which is something she would have been eligible for in just one year, by 2013.