A spot of trouble leads to official disaffection

It all started, Lori Lee says, with the hickey. That dreaded splotch of red right next to her left collarbone that has prompted more than its share of “Hey, nice hickey!” remarks over the years.

Except, it’s not a hickey. It’s there on Monday, and it’s still there on Friday. And the next Monday and the next Friday. It is her constant companion.

It’s a birthmark.

And in a roundabout way, Lee says, it got her fired from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

I only have Lee’s version, because a sheriff’s lieutenant involved in the matter says it is departmental policy not to discuss publicly any personnel issue.

But Lee was fired last month after three weeks on the job, and she’s sitting in her La Habra living room and describing, with humor and bit of irritation, how the job she really wanted vanished.

Lee started Feb. 12 as a temporary employee who had passed the physical, psychological and oral tests needed to become a custodial assistant -- meaning she’d work in the jail. While most people blanch at that job, Lee says she wanted it and was even hoping to get the graveyard shift.

And all was well, she says, until one of her supervisors noticed the birthmark one day and, according to Lee, said something along the lines of, “Hey, what’s that?”

“I said, ‘That’s a birthmark,’ ” Lee says.

“I don’t care what it is,” she recalls her supervisor saying, “You need to cover it up. If Sheriff Baca sees that, he can cause all kinds of problems for you. And you’re representing the department.”

Lee replied that she knew her rights and would not cover it. Besides, she tells me, she had seen other women in the office with visible tattoos on their chests. And, like all employees are required to do, Lee had identified the birthmark in her pre-employment file.

That initial encounter with her supervisor led to a series of meetings with higher-ups over the next few days. In one of them, Lee says, a captain assured her she didn’t have to cover it up and noted that the supervisor had let the matter drop after learning it wasn’t a hickey. That gave Lee pause, because she says the supervisor had done just the opposite.

Still, she thought they were on her side.

“This is where I went stupid,” Lee says. “I said I was so glad to be working for the Sheriff’s Department, because at the last job I had, I had to sue them.” She had a won a settlement from her previous employer, alleging wrongful termination and sexual harassment.

As soon as the words had left her mouth, she says, “I knew I’d screwed up.”

She sensed her superiors felt threatened, as though she might sue them over the birthmark matter. She says she probably made it worse by telling them immediately she didn’t mean it that way and had no interest in suing them.

A few days later, on March 7, she was fired. As a temporary employee, she had no recourse. They didn’t need to give her a reason and didn’t, she says. Later on, she heard through the grapevine that it involved a “conduct” matter.

To this day, Lee says, she doesn’t know what conduct they’re referring to.

She theorizes it may have been the fact she told her estranged husband, who is a sheriff’s deputy. He subsequently reported it as a possible hazing issue. Or it may be what she considers the bogus claim that she lost her cool with the supervisor who first asked about the birthmark. It was the supervisor, she says, who was the more emotional.

“Since that day, I’ve gone through in my mind, what did I do?” Lee says. “I can’t come up with anything. I didn’t scream, yell, cuss or threaten them. I did nothing. It’s just like I’m sitting here talking to you.”

What bugs her, she says, is that she really wanted the job. “It took me 10 months to get this job,” she says.

“It was going to be a career, a steppingstone with the county. I’m angry. I don’t want to sue. I don’t want to do anything. I just want them to see I didn’t mean to throw that out there like that, that I’m some sort of sue-happy person.”

How ironic, I suggest, that the hickey issue reared its ugly head again.

“I hate hickeys,” she says. “I really do. To me, they’re just trashy-looking. I can see where they thought it was a hickey.”

I can think of only one presumably neutral witness -- L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy John Lee, her husband of 13 years but estranged for the last five.

He knows the department and he knows his wife. I ask for his assessment.

He thinks his wife has it right, that the department figured it had a potential troublemaker on its hands and dumped her. It probably wasn’t even about covering up the birthmark, he says; it’s that she balked when her supervisor barked.

“These people don’t like to be corrected or told they did something wrong,” he says of some department supervisors. “It’s not whether they’re right or wrong. The fact that someone so new was willing to stand up and say something back to them -- they just don’t like that and don’t want to hear it.”

Lee says he feels bad because he thinks his decision to push the hazing complaint may have led to his wife’s downfall.

“I feel extremely bad because I know how much she was looking forward to doing this and getting on her feet,” Lee says.

He encouraged her to apply for the position but now feels like he inadvertently scuttled her efforts.

Lori Lee knows her job isn’t coming back. At 41 and with three children at home, she isn’t sure about her next move. And would she do anything differently?

“I wish now I’d said, ‘OK, I’ll cover it up.’ ” she says. “I should have just covered it up and shut my mouth.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at

dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns: www.latimes.com/parsons