Rancho Cordova chief sues Scott Jones, says sheriff pushed her out over false allegations

Former Rancho Cordova Police Chief Kate Adams is suing Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, accusing him of forcing her out of the department over trumped-up racism allegations to avoid negative publicity for him as he ran for Congress this year.

The 30-page lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in federal court in Sacramento, says Jones and others in the Sheriff’s Office threatened to fire Adams and publicize “false allegations of racism” unless she quietly quit her post in September 2021 as police chief for Rancho Cordova, which contracts with the sheriff to provide law enforcement services.

“This threat came amidst a hostile workplace where Defendants failed to afford Ms. Adams due process during internal investigations, failed to investigate a conspiracy to defame her when she brought it to their attention, and failed to protect her from a coordinated barrage of baseless accusations,” the suit says. “The threat of defamation and a hostile workplace effectively forced Ms. Adams to resign.”

Episode began with racist New Year’s Eve texts

The suit lays out a series of anonymous allegations made against Adams and says the entire episode began on New Year’s Eve in 2013 and involved text messages containing racist memes.

The suit also says Jones was trying to avoid a “media circus” during his run for Congress, which he ultimately lost in June, and that he hired a close friend and political ally — former Sheriff John McGinness — to investigate allegations against Adams and “rubber stamp” the internal affairs probe of Adams.

It also claims that allegations made about her departure have cost her job opportunities elsewhere.

The suit is the latest twist in a series of claims involving Adams, a Sheriff’s Office captain who was appointed as chief in April 2020 and announced her “retirement” 17 months later after a 27-year career.

“Thank you, Chief Adams, for your many contributions and your dedication to making the City of Rancho Cordova a great place to live, work, learn and play,” City Manager Cyrus Abhar said in a statement at the time. “We wish you every happiness as you head into retirement.”

First charge of racism surfaced last March

Rumors about her departure began soon after, and in March the Sacramento chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent a letter to Jones alleging that Adams had been “placed on an extended administrative leave” before her retirement because of “racially charged” text messages Adams sent “to many other Sheriff’s Department employees.”

The letter included a copy of a meme showing a white man holding a beer and spraying a Black child in the back of the head with a garden hose.

The caption reads: “Go be a n----- somewhere else.”

“It cannot be classified as a joke,” NAACP President Betty Williams wrote at the time. “It’s an obvious racist depiction.”

The lawsuit claims the episode began on New Year’s Eve 2013 when she and a friend and co-worker at the Sheriff’s Office were exchanging text messages and Adams sent one containing a “horribly racist meme” with a note from Adams that said, “Some rude racist just sent this!!”

Adams’ co-worker replied “That’s not right,” the suit says, and Adams sent another text with the message, “Oh, and just in case u think I encourage this ...” the suit says.

“At no point in the text message exchange did Ms. Adams state or imply that she found the memes humorous or agreed with their racist message,” the suit says. “Rather, a review of the text message conversation clearly demonstrates that Ms. Adams was condemning the memes and their content.”

Nothing came of the exchange for years, the lawsuit says.

Suit blames a sheriff’s deputy chief for probe

But in February 2019, according to the lawsuit, “a Rocklin city official contacted Ms. Adams and informed her of possible misconduct by fellow sheriff’s Captain LeeAnneDra Marchese.”

“Specifically, the city official informed Ms. Adams that Marchese had instructed on-duty (sheriff’s) officers to install unauthorized surveillance cameras in a neighboring county,” the lawsuit says. “Pursuant to her duty as a (sheriff’s) officer, Ms. Adams forwarded the allegation regarding Marchese to the Department’s Internal Affairs Division.”

The lawsuit says that the standard operating procedure for an internal investigation “required that Marchese be notified that it had been Ms. Adams who forwarded the complaint against her. Shortly after this incident, a slew of anonymous and false complaints were submitted accusing Ms. Adams of misconduct.”

“Up until that point,” according to the suit, “Ms. Adams had earned an unblemished reputation for good conduct, never having had a complaint filed against her in over 25 years of service as a law enforcement officer.”

Marchese, now a chief deputy at the Sheriff’s Office, was once a close friend of Adams, according to a source.

Marchese declined to comment Thursday after The Sacramento Bee emailed her a copy of the lawsuit.

“I have no knowledge of this and thanks for bringing it to my attention,” Marchese wrote in an email. “I have zero desire to comment on Ms. Adams allegations as this was investigated by the County of Sacramento and I’m unaware of the findings.”

Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. Rod Grassmann also declined comment, citing the agency’s policy to not comment on pending litigation.

Three complaints against chief were baseless, suit says

Adams’ lawsuit claims that the first complaint lodged against her came Nov. 11, 2019, and alleged she used her sheriff’s vehicle to drive her daughter to softball practice and “used a homophobic slur” during a softball event.

Internal affairs investigated the complaint and cleared Adams, according to the lawsuit, which says Adams had not attended the softball event in question.

A second complaint was filed Jan. 1, 2020, again alleging that Adams was misusing her vehicle to take her daughter to softball, and again she was cleared, the suit says.

Following Adams’ appointment as police chief, a third complaint was filed “which rehashed the same allegations made in the previous two complaints,” the suit says.

“After conducting its own review, the city of Rancho Cordova concluded that the third anonymous complaint made against Ms. Adams in the span of four months was baseless as well,” the lawsuit says.

“The third anonymous complaint not only included the same allegations as the first two complaints against Ms. Adams, but was clearly written by someone in the department who had known Ms. Adams for many years,” the suit says, saying Adams began to suspect Marchese or someone else in the Sheriff’s Office as the source of the complaints.

“This suspicion was further supported by the fact that both Ms. Adams’ and Marchese’s daughters played in the same softball league, and a softball event was the location where two of the alleged false incidents were to have taken place,” the lawsuit says.

Official drove by chief’s home, sped away, suit says

“In July 2020, Ms. Adams was working from home, with authorization to do so, when she went to her vehicle to pick up lunch. As she sat in her vehicle preparing to leave, she noticed Marchese driving down her street. When Marchese noticed Ms. Adams, she became furtive, quickly made a U-turn, and sped away.

“On that day in July 2020, Marchese had no legitimate reason to be near Ms. Adams’ home. Marchese did not live or work in the vicinity, and on that particular day, she had been assigned to work 29 miles away at the county courthouse in downtown Sacramento.”

Adams was “deeply concerned” and filed a harassment complaint with the county’s equal opportunity office against Marchese on July 24, 2020, the suit says.

While that office began investigating, Marchese told an interviewer that Adams had sent her racist memes on New Year’s Eve in 2013, a claim the suit says was a “blatant attempt by Marchese to distract from the investigation into her own misconduct.”

“Although Marchese had disposed of the phone on which she received the memes from Ms. Adams long before her EEO interview, miraculously, she had printed screenshots of this text exchange devoid of its larger context,” the suit says. “In her interview, Marchese went to great lengths to convey that she had made it ‘very clear’ to her supervisors over the years that she had observed Ms. Adams displaying racist behavior.

“(Yet), the record reflects that she did not explain why she waited over seven years to report the printed screenshots that allegedly show Ms. Adams evincing racist beliefs.”

This led to a new investigation of Adams and a decision by the Sheriff’s Office to offer Adams a choice: “she could either (a) be terminated ... and publicly mischaracterized as a racist, thereby tarnishing her reputation and subjecting her family to ridicule; or (b) quietly resign from a career she had built 27 years and avoid being falsely maligned as a racist in the press,” the lawsuit says.

Adams resigned “under duress,” the suit says.

Sheriff farmed probe out to ex-sheriff, close friend

“The defendants’ threat to make the false allegations public unless she resigned, and the terrifying potential consequences for her family if those allegations played out in the media, was paramount in her decision to retire,” the suit says.

The desire for Adams to leave quietly was designed to avoid a “media circus,” the lawsuit says, especially by Jones, “who had already announced his intention to run for Congress, and who was perceived by many to have a negative track record on race relations.”

Jones did not announce his candidacy for Congress until January 2022, months after Adams stepped down, Bee archives show.

The sheriff’s investigation into Adams should have been reviewed by the county’s inspector general, the suit says, but Jones deviated from that protocol and farmed it out to an independent review by former Sheriff John McGinness, a longtime friend and political ally of Jones, the suit says.

McGinness “rubber-stamped” the sheriff’s investigation, the lawsuit claims.

McGinness, now a law enforcement consultant and radio show host with KFBK radio, declined comment Thursday.

At the time of Adams’ departure, she was teaching as an adjunct professor at William Jessup University, and later applied for a job at the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards (POST), where she scored 90 out of 100 on its entrance exam and had a job interview set for April 13, the suit says.

But the NAACP letter to Jones became public in March when The Bee published a story revealing the claims about the racist memes, and William Jessup asked her to resign a week later, the suit says.

The day she was scheduled to interview with POST, Adams was told “that, in light of the article, it could not hire her, despite her extensive experience and excellent exam scores,” the suit says.

“As a direct result of defendants’ falsehoods and retaliation, Ms. Adams was forced to endure significant blows to her professional career and personal reputation,” the suit says. “Since June 2021, Ms. Adams has sought counseling to treat the anxiety, stress, and depression caused by the false allegations asserted against her, the sham investigation that resulted in her forced resignation, The Bee article that falsely maligned her character, the unsupported attacks on her personal character, and her resulting inability to find alternative means of employment.”

The suit alleges, among other claims, denial of due process, violation of free speech rights, invasion of privacy and retaliation, and seeks damages from the county, Jones and unnamed defendants.

This story was originally published August 26, 2022 at 10:12 AM.