Sexually Harassed DWP Official Files $2.5-Million Suit : Litigation: Her legal action names the agency, bosses and the city. Officials acknowledge that misdeeds occurred, but say they are working to resolve the complaint.

A woman administrator who the city found was sexually harassed by her supervisor in the Department of Water and Power has sued the agency, her bosses and the city of Los Angeles for $2.5 million.

“The department will see that women are not just going to walk away,” plaintiff Michelle Nagel said Wednesday during a press conference at the Pasadena office of her attorney, Dan Stormer. “(The suit) will force the city and the mayor to realize empty policy is not enough.”

While acknowledging that Nagel did suffer sexual harassment, Beverly King, head of the DWP’s Human Resources Division, said she was surprised by the legal action filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Stormer and an assistant city attorney had been meeting to resolve Nagel’s complaints.

“We really felt that the discussions were continuing and going along well,” King said.

Stormer said the city had broken off discussions.

Nagel, 29, of Granada Hills, is a utility management assistant and a four-year DWP employee. She was accompanied Wednesday by her husband, John, also a DWP employee. Nagel said she sued to protect both her and her husband’s jobs and to stop retaliation that she alleges has occurred at work since she filed her initial complaint with the DWP.

Nagel said her supervisor, Harold Brou, spread a false rumor in August, 1991, that she was having an affair with an engineer in the department’s Van Nuys office, where she works.

The rumor was in retaliation for her participation in the disciplining of another DWP employee, and Brou threatened to tell her husband of the purported affair, Nagel said. Later, the plaintiff said, she became the target of sexual jokes and teasing by co-workers. In all, the suit names six male DWP employees.

Previously a sexual harassment counselor for employees in her department, Nagel filed a complaint with the DWP’s Human Resources Division. The city’s investigation found last December that Nagel was a victim of sexual harassment. But the recommended remedies and discipline never were implemented, Nagel said.

Instead, her supervisors called a meeting during which the confidentiality of her complaint was breached when Nagel was asked to explain the action to co-workers. Her supervisors, reluctant to discipline Brou, who was nearing retirement, simply let him apologize to her in a meeting, Nagel said.

Further, a sexual harassment training session recommended by Human Resources evolved, instead, into a nearly two-hour viewing of photographs of almost naked women, Nagel said.

Finally, Nagel claims that her bosses retaliated by reducing her job responsibilities, undermining her authority and promoting one of the men who allegedly harassed her.

King disputed some of Nagel’s allegations. Brou, she said, was disciplined and lost two days’ pay. Nagel has not been demoted and is considered a valuable employee, King said. And the sexual harassment training sessions do not involve photos of nearly naked people, she said.

The city has received commendations for the training program and takes seriously allegations of sexual harassment, King added. In the past 12 years, more than 60 DWP employees have been disciplined for sexual harassment, she said. Women make up 23% of the DWP’s 11,500 employees, but 65% of the agency’s 117 utility management assistants are, like Nagel, women, she said.

The suit comes on the heels of a survey released last month by the city’s Commission on the Status of Women that found that 37% of women employees surveyed had been subjected to sexual harassment within the past year. As a result, Mayor Tom Bradley ordered that sexual harassment training be stepped up.

Two former members of City Councilman Nate Holden’s staff recently filed complaints with the state Department of Fair Housing and Employment alleging that he sexually harassed them.