Judge awards R2.25 million to Riverside County sergeant who was forced to resign after reporting abuse
Riverside County has been ordered to pay $2.25 million to a former sergeant who said he was pressured into early retirement in retaliation for reporting harassment by a supervisor.
Sgt. Frank Lodes was forced to quit a job he loved in 2022 — writing a resignation letter in a Del Taco parking lot — while a department official threatened him with a further investigation, according to the complaint. On Tuesday, a civil jury ruled that Lodes voluntarily resigned as a result of her reporting of a hostile workplace and was awarded a multimillion-dollar settlement as compensation for her emotional injuries.
Lodes' lawyer, Bijan Darvish, said the award was a “huge number” that adequately represented the damage done to Lodes, noting that the period since his forced retirement had been the “darkest four years” of Lodes' life.
He said his client did not want to comment on the decision as it is always painful to talk about incidents. The Sheriff's Department and the county did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being a police officer was his life; he lived and breathed it 24/7,” Darvish said. “It was everything to him, that's why it was difficult for him when he was taken away.”
The judges' award comes amid a rare wide-open governor's race that includes Sheriff's Department chief Chad Bianco, the GOP front-runner for the position. Bianco based his campaign on his long legal career, which spans more than three decades, including serving as the elected sheriff of Riverside County since 2019.
Although senior Sheriff's Department officials 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 case. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Darvish says the case points to the department's culture of covering up allegations of misconduct.
“If there is a complaint about abuse of the captain but they never investigate, then they pressure the person to resign and withdraw the complaint,” he said, “that is an organized issue.”
The retaliation began after Lodes, a 25-year veteran of the department, formally reported workplace harassment in March 2022, according to the complaint.
Lodes was called out for mental illness in front of his peers by the captain during a confirmation hearing in October 2021. A few months later, he found derogatory posters of his head on a child's body stuffed into his uniform pockets and a gun and taped to the walls of the station, according to the complaint.
The department responded to the report of his abuse by launching an illegal investigation into Lodes using informants and threatening criminal prosecution, according to Darvish.
The judge agreed that the allegations were fabricated excuses to cover up illegal retaliation.
A few days after she filed her workplace harassment complaint, an Interior Department sergeant packed Lodes' belongings into a box and took them to her home, according to the complaint. The sergeant spent hours pressuring Lodes, then 47, to agree to early retirement.
The next day, Lodes was told to meet with a senior Sheriff's Department official in the Del Taco parking lot who ordered him to immediately resign and withdraw his harassment complaint.
The $2.25-million award in the civil case will come out of the county's coffers.
The award re-evaluates Bianco's Sheriff's Department two weeks before primary election ballots arrive in California mailboxes.
He was again in the spotlight in March after he confiscated more than 650,000 votes from the November election as part of an investigation into whether they were counted fraudulently. He halted the investigation shortly before the California Supreme Court suspended it pending further review.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
