Schools Employee Claiming Sex Harassment Says System Is an Obstacle : Courts: Woman is suing San Bernardino County education chief over alleged lewd comments. But she’s running out of money, while he can use public funds to defend himself.

Linda Frost says the obscene calls from her boss, San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools Charles S. Terrell Jr., began shortly after she went to work for his office five years ago.

Late at night, Frost charges in court documents, Terrell would telephone her at home and make lewd comments. Once, she says, he called from a Sacramento hotel, informing her he was watching a dirty movie and asking her “to masturbate while he did.”

After about 25 calls and what she contends was complete inaction when she complained to her immediate supervisors, Frost, 49, a former Apple Valley school board member hired as a community liaison worker in Terrell’s office, found her own attorney and filed a sexual harassment suit against Terrell, his office and San Bernardino County.

The November, 1990, action in San Bernardino County Superior Court, in which Frost has sought $120,000 in damages, alleges that Terrell, 61, violated her civil rights and caused her humiliation, anguish and distress.

Almost a year later, Frost, who is now the office’s liaison for teen mothers, is nearly out of money to pay her attorneys, and her case is nowhere near trial. Meanwhile, Terrell’s lawyers, who are being paid with public funds, have filed a battery of legal motions to prevent Frost from getting the phone records she maintains can help prove her charges.

On Wednesday, a Superior Court judge ordered both sides to meet with a court-appointed referee. The referee will determine whether Frost should receive the records of all calls that Terrell made since 1986, to her and to three other women whom Frost believes may also have been harassed.

The situation, Frost says, illuminates the overwhelming difficulties women face in fighting back against harassment.

Both plaintiff and defendant are public employees. But Frost must pay her own legal costs, while Terrell’s attorneys are paid with public funds. Not only are they defending him, she says, but they are also trying to delay a trial until she no longer can afford to fight.

“They know I’m running out of money and that’s the way they’re going to bust me,” Frost said late last week. “It’s an awful shame for women, or men, when anyone has to bow down under someone’s thumb. It’s a very mind-raping experience.”

Attorneys for Terrell and his office counter that most of the phone records are irrelevant and add that their only mission is to provide Terrell with the best defense possible.

“Merely because someone has made an accusation doesn’t mean it’s true,” said Amy Greyson, a co-counsel for Terrell, who was elected to his third term several months before the case was filed. “Dr. Terrell is entitled to a defense, as is his office.”

Terrell, who previously refused to be interviewed about the case, made his first public statement last week in a two-page fax to reporters. Declaring that he was responding to inquiries apparently prompted by sexual harassment allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Terrell stated: “I have and will continue to defend vigorously myself and cooperate fully in the defense of the office of the superintendent relating to the groundless allegations made by Linda Frost.”

Greyson, in the same statement, charged that Frost chose not to pursue administrative remedies within the superintendent’s office, instead going directly to court shortly after filing a discrimination complaint with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

Frost’s co-counsel, Joan T. Lind, counters that before Frost filed her suit, she complained without success to several supervisors.

“She was given no advice, no counseling, no assurances that they would do whatever was in their power to assist her in eliminating this kind of behavior,” Lind said. “In fact, she received virtually no response to her complaints.”

In an interview last week, Frost, who served on the Apple Valley school board for 12 years, said she has known Terrell since he assumed the post of county superintendent in 1981.

Frost, who was divorced in 1983, says she considered the married superintendent to be a friend but never had a sexual relationship with him.

In the mid-1980s, Frost accepted a post in Terrell’s office as liaison for programs for delinquent teens.

Frost says the late-night calls began shortly after she began working with troubled youths at a county-run boys ranch. She didn’t immediately complain to her immediate supervisor, she said, because “I was scared for my job.”

“My alimony had stopped,” she said last week. “My son was in his senior year of college. What was I going to do? I’d never had this happen before . . . I thought this was going to go away. You think all kinds of things, including terror.”

In July, 1987, when she married her present husband, flight engineer Bob Frost, the late-night calls stopped, she says. But the incidents began anew two years after her remarriage, Frost adds.

At a hotel in San Jose during a state school boards convention, she contends in legal papers, Terrell exposed himself to her. Months later, she said, Terrell called her at home from Las Vegas, telling her he was masturbating while watching a pornographic movie.

“I couldn’t believe he, he, he had brazenly called my house with my husband (there),” she said in a deposition. “I felt more violated for (him) than I did even for myself almost.”

Frost said that after she complained to her boss, Leslie Shelbourne, in the spring of 1990, the incidents halted. But no investigation resulted and she was never interviewed about her charges, she said.

Moreover, she was transferred to her current post, which her attorneys term “a demotion.” And the county Sheriff’s Department withdrew her permit to carry a concealed weapon, an action she claims was prompted by Terrell.

Shelbourne refused comment Thursday, referring inquiries to Terrell’s attorneys.

Defense attorneys contend that most of the phone records Frost is seeking are private, and they would prove nothing even if disclosed.

“There’s an assumption by (Frost’s) counsel that the mere fact of a phone call from a telephone to which Dr. Terrell may have had access . . . would prove the contents of the phone call itself--that’s preposterous,” said James S. Wiederschall, attorney for the superintendent’s office and its insurer, the Inland Empire Schools Insurance Authority.

Wiederschall added that if the case does reach trial, he plans to take the offensive. They intend to show “she has a propensity to fabricate information, to exaggerate information, to twist information,” he said.

A spokesman for Terrell’s office said $170,000 in public funds has already been spent on legal costs in the case. In his release, Terrell said he is “quite concerned that it is necessary for public educational dollars to be expended in the defense. . . .”

Frost said she owes $49,000 to her attorneys, the Los Angeles law firm of Ross & Scott.

“(Terrell’s lawyers) figure they’ll bleed me dry and I’ll be dumped by my attorney,” she said Friday, while watching Senate committee testimony of Thomas’ accuser, Anita Faye Hill, in her motor home. “I can’t tell you how mad it makes me.”

“The lesson that’s been learned here is it’s tough to fight City Hall and it takes a lot of money,” Lind said. “And that’s not a good lesson.”