Claim Filed Over Withdrawal of Job Offer

A top deputy in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office has filed a claim against the Pasadena City Council, alleging that the panel violated her civil rights when it gave her the job of city attorney and then withdrew the offer after her bankruptcy filings came to light.

In the claim, filed last week as a precursor to a lawsuit, Cheryl Ward, senior assistant attorney of Los Angeles, alleges that the Pasadena council also violated her privacy with media leaks, discriminated against her on the basis of race and gender, breached a contract and ultimately crushed her dream of a judgeship. She is seeking unspecified damages.

“Having had her personal tribulations splattered in public and having been portrayed as a financial charlatan, the public embarrassment was unbearable,” according to the claim filed by her attorney, D. Jay Ritt.

Councilman Paul Little said the suit probably would “go all the way to court and we will win.”

In February, Ward accepted the council’s offer to become the city’s first African American city attorney. But the offer was withdrawn within six weeks after questions over two bankruptcies, a probe into her life by a city-hired private investigator and a series of local newspaper stories that quoted council members talking about her personal finances, the claim stated.

According to the claim, Ward told officials that the first bankruptcy was filed by her first husband in the 1970s, to discharge a student loan debt that he later paid off. She told officials that the second bankruptcy, in 1991, was to stop a foreclosure on her home and facilitate its sale.