Bailiff Fired Over Sexual Conduct Says He’s the Victim : Courts: The former officer sues to regain his job. Lots of deputies have done a lot worse and not gotten fired, Frank Bowling asserts.

Frank Bowling, a former Superior Court bailiff, can’t understand why he got fired.

He concedes that he had sex with a court clerk at the Van Nuys courthouse. They even did it in a judge’s chambers.

A court reporter alleges he masturbated in front of her in a courtroom office. He says he merely grabbed his crotch and rubbed on the outside of his fly, and then walked away.

He often talked about sex with female co-workers. He admits he told a female juror she had nice legs.

But what, Bowling asks, did he do wrong?

“I’m the one who’s being portrayed as a predator,” he said. “I’m the beast. Yet I end up being the victim.”

Bowling, 39, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy assigned to bailiff duty, filed suit recently in Los Angeles Superior Court, asking for his job back and back pay. The case apparently marks the first time a Los Angeles Superior Court bailiff has been fired on the basis of sexual misconduct or harassment.

It’s also a case that underscores the dilemma inherent in divining who’s telling the truth when it comes to the emotionally charged allegation of sexual misconduct in the workplace--and in the calculation of whether those allegations warrant the taking of someone’s job.

For the Sheriff’s Department, the issues of character, credibility and fair play presented by Bowling’s case come at an especially delicate moment. The 7,900-member department, the nation’s third-largest law enforcement agency, has long been accused of insensitivity to issues of sexual harassment.

In December, the department announced its intent to settle two landmark lawsuits brought by female deputies who alleged job discrimination and harassment, promising as part of the deal to implement a course in gender sensitivity for every member of the department, including Sheriff Sherman Block.

In announcing the settlement, which must still be approved by a Los Angeles federal judge, county officials said the time had come to revamp attitudes.

It’s the zeal with which the department is going about its institutional attitude adjustment that has fueled Bowling’s anger and frustration.

Lots of Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies have done a lot worse and not gotten fired, Bowling said.

Indeed, Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission files are replete with tawdry tales involving male deputies--like the one who department officials alleged showed his buddies a secretly made videotape of a female neighbor in the shower and bragged about making another explicit tape, of himself with his girlfriend.

That deputy, officials alleged, also violated department policy three times by transporting Richard Ramirez--the so-called “Night Stalker,” convicted of multiple murders--without required backup deputies. The deputy openly violated departmental no-smoking policies. He drove his personal car for 11 months without current registration.

For all these transgressions, the Sheriff’s Department recommended in 1989 that this deputy be demoted, according to the Civil Service Commission files. Other recent cases in the files--one deputy who apparently had oral sex in a squad car with a unidentified woman and at least two who solicited prostitutes--brought department recommendations of temporary suspensions without pay.

In Bowling’s case, the penalty was termination. Yet the sex with the court clerk, Bowling said in an interview, was consensual--and she still has her job. He said he did not expose himself in front of the court reporter. The comments to co-workers and to the juror, he said, were just friendly conversation.

“The Sheriff’s Department wants to show it’s politically correct,” Bowling said. “It wants to set an example, to make an example of me, to show they are attuned to the attitudes of the times--without regard to the truth.”

Lt. Bill McSweeney, a supervisor in the department’s internal affairs bureau, which investigated Bowling’s case, dismissed Bowling’s charge as nonsense.

The department, McSweeney said, is not out to make an example of anyone, only to rid itself of deputies who don’t behave--such as Bowling.

“It’s our position that Frank took his sexual interests to the job site and was entirely inappropriate in a number of areas,” McSweeney said.

“That was shown in his hearing,” McSweeney said, referring to several days of testimony last year before a Civil Service Commission hearing officer, “and his termination was found ultimately to be justified. It’s that simple.”

The department told Jan Stiglitz, a San Diego law professor who served as the hearing officer, that Bowling was a “sexually obsessed predator” who forced two women into sexual encounters and created a “hostile and uncomfortable” work environment for female employees at the courthouse.

Bowling’s version of the events, according to a report Stiglitz issued last July, is that he was a fine employee who “merely had two sexual relationships with female co-employees which did not end with good feelings.”

“The truth,” Stiglitz wrote, “seems to lie somewhere in between.”

It is undisputed that Bowling was a hard-working bailiff. A 13-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, he was assigned to the Van Nuys court in 1984.

Most days, Bowling worked in Superior Court Judge Irwin Nebron’s courtroom.

“In terms of his service as a bailiff in the court, I’ve been on the bench in excess of 25 years and he was the best bailiff I’ve ever had,” Nebron said in an interview.

Over time, Bowling grew friendly with a court reporter--the official who types out, word for word, what is said when court is in session. It’s the nature of their relationship that is in dispute.

She said they rarely saw each other when work ended. He said they saw each other frequently. And she conceded that she invited him to join her bowling league.

She denied ever touching him in a sexually suggestive way. He said she frequently gave him intimate massages, even at work. His neighbor testified that she saw a woman--whom Bowling identified as the court reporter--drop him off at his house and give him a sensuous massage.

She said they did discuss sex but she told him to stop. He said they engaged in a stream of sexual banter and flirted with each other. He testified that she liked to tell him she was not wearing underwear, only pantyhose, and that on two or three occasions she lifted her skirt to show him just that.

On June 29, 1987, at lunch, he changed from his uniform into blue shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

She said he closed the door to her office, dropped his pants and began masturbating. She turned away and told him to leave. When he was done, she said, he left, warning her not to tell anyone.

Bowling’s version: He did not close the door but did ask her to lift up her skirt. She did but then turned away. He grabbed his crotch, through his pants. (“Michael Jackson does that at his performance every night,” Bowling said last week.)

He asked what she wanted. She told him to do whatever he felt like doing, Bowling said. Dismayed by her equivocal response, he became angry, called her names and left. The next day, he apologized.

Despite his warning to be silent, she said, she told two co-workers about what happened within half an hour.

The two co-workers testified at the Civil Service Commission hearing, however, that she never told them about the incident.

Worse, said the hearing officer, neither of the co-workers was ever interviewed by the sheriff’s internal affairs detectives.

“It appears,” Stiglitz said in his report, that the court reporter “has not been truthful about one of the most critical parts of her story.” She no longer works at the Van Nuys court and could not be located for comment.

Though the incident took place June 29, 1987, the court reporter waited 3 1/2 years, until Dec. 11, 1990, to report it to internal affairs.

The court reporter said she was not going to report the incident but did upon hearing that Bowling had been having an unhappy affair with the court clerk. In April, 1989, the clerk and Bowling started seeing each other regularly at lunch, sometimes talking about problems with her marriage.

The next month, the clerk and Bowling had a sexual encounter in an empty fourth-floor courtroom, the clerk told sheriff’s investigators. After that, their sex play became frequent, though there was no intercourse because she did not want that, she said.

Bowling pushed the relationship forward--but, she said, she was a willing participant. That summer, they met for sex at a baseball field near the Van Nuys courthouse. At least 10 times, she said, they used an empty fourth-floor courtroom.

In October, 1989, in Judge Nebron’s chambers after work, they had intercourse. Two months later, citing the incident in the judge’s chambers, she told Bowling she didn’t want to see him again.

However, Stiglitz said, she did meet with Bowling at least four more times over the next few months, through the summer of 1990. Each meeting included sex.

Though she went with him voluntarily, she also said she felt she was being harassed by him. He would call and say he wanted her, she said. She believed he was taking advantage of her vulnerability.

Bowling said last week there was no truth to that claim.

“She is exaggerating,” he said. “This is basically a love affair that went wrong, as love affairs do when you break up.”

The clerk, reached by phone last week at the Van Nuys courthouse, declined to comment.

In December, 1989, Bowling told his supervisors that he was involved in a courthouse affair and wanted a transfer.

“When I make a mistake, I try to amend my mistakes,” he said. “I tried to get out of the situation at that courthouse. And the mistake I made is hurting my wife’s feelings and betraying my wife’s trust. That was wrong on my part.”

Bowling worked at a different court until June, 1990, when Nebron insisted he return to the Van Nuys courthouse.

When he came back, the clerk would come by his courtroom just to visit, according to testimony at the civil service hearing.

In December, 1990, the court reporter called the court clerk. Soon after, sheriff’s investigators visited Bowling.

Aside from whatever relationship Bowling had with the court reporter and the court clerk, investigators charged that he frequently made crude and unwelcome sexual remarks to other women at the courthouse, including employees and jurors.

There were no complaints, however, from female co-workers--nor from the juror whose legs drew Bowling’s attention. The day after Bowling told the juror in the courtroom that she had nice legs, she brought him brownies.

Adding it all up, Stiglitz ruled last July, Bowling deserved only to be suspended for 15 days, not fired.

The Civil Service Commission took the unusual step of adopting Stiglitz’s factual findings in the case as its own--but then deciding last September that the department was right, that Bowling deserved to be fired. It offered no explanation.

Five months later, Bowling is still without work. He remains bewildered.

“I have a very, very hollow feeling in me,” he said, “an emptiness in my soul.”