Ex-Conroy Aide to Be Paid $360,000 in Settlement

Assembly attorneys agreed Thursday to pay $360,000 to a fired legislative employee who a trial court jury said suffered emotional distress at the hands of a former Orange County lawmaker and his top aide.

The settlement closes the legal fight between former Assemblyman Mickey Conroy and Robyn Boyd, the one-time assistant who accused him of sexual harassment.

Both sides claimed a measure of victory after the settlement was announced.

Boyd said the award represented more than double what she originally asked for after filing the lawsuit in 1994. Assembly attorneys, meanwhile, noted that it was far less than the more than $1.4 million in damages and attorney fees being sought by Boyd’s lawyers.

“I see it as a clear victory,” Boyd said. “But I think the taxpayers should be angry at their government. They have fought this case so hard merely to preserve the rights of lawmakers to harass women.”

Conroy, meanwhile, said the final settlement was irrelevant because he and his chief of staff, Pete Conaty, had already been cleared of the most serious charges in their trial. “The bottom line is we were found innocent,” he said.

In May, a Sacramento jury rejected sexual harassment and battery allegations against the Orange Republican and Conaty but found that the pair inflicted emotional distress on Boyd and awarded her $386,000.

Assembly attorneys immediately fought the award, claiming it should be thrown out on a legal technicality because there was no finding of sexual harassment against Boyd and she didn’t qualify for any money.

Boyd’s attorneys expressed confidence Thursday that they could have overcome those arguments but suggested that the Assembly simply would have dragged the case on, potentially to a new trial on the damages.

“In many respects, this is a compromise,” said J. Scott Smith, one of Boyd’s attorneys. “What it boiled down to basically was, in order to allow Robyn to get fair compensation now, we were willing to eat our attorneys’ fees.”

He said Assembly attorneys rejected a offer to settle the case in August 1994 for $149,000.

“The taxpayers really lost,” Smith said. “Not only did they have to pay a bigger settlement but they incurred three years of costs. At a minimum, I’d say it cost the state $500,000.”

Dennis Murphy, the Assembly’s attorney in the case, said the legal fees were less than $400,000. Moreover, he said the case had to be pressed forward because a settlement would have put Conroy--and the Assembly as a whole--in a position of being judged guilty without a trial.

“Let’s face it, this couldn’t have been resolved before because there were claims in the press that the Assembly was an Animal House,” Murphy said. “We proved there was no sexual harassment, so where’s the Animal House?”

Murphy said the settlement came in large part because of the prodding of the trial court judge, who urged both sides to stop their haggling and settled in the neighborhood of what the jury awarded.

“He made sure they were well aware they could lose,” Murphy said, “and he tried to let us know it wasn’t a slam dunk and that we could lose.”

Boyd claimed that she was fired for complaining about an office environment that included profanity, sexual innuendo and unwanted physical advances by her bosses. She also alleged that the Assembly, as an institution, failed to prevent harassment of its employees.

Conroy and Conaty denied the allegations, countering that many of the accusations had been blown out of proportion or misconstrued.