Riverside County has been ordered to pay $2.25 million to a former sergeant who said he was pressured into early retirement in retaliation for reporting workplace harassment by a superior.
Sgt. Frank Lodes was forced to leave the job he loved in 2022 — penning a resignation letter in a Del Taco parking lot — while a high-ranking department official threatened him with mounting investigations, according to the complaint. On Tuesday a civil jury concluded that Lodes resigned involuntarily due to his reporting of a hostile workplace and was awarded the multimillion-dollar payment as compensation for his emotional damages.
Lodes’ attorney Bijan Darvish said the award was a “significant number” that adequately represents the harm inflicted on Lodes, noting that the period since his forced retirement has been the “darkest four years” of Lodes’ life.
He said that his client did not wish to comment on the verdict as discussing the events remained painful. The Sheriff’s Department and the county did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being a cop was his life; he lived and breathed it 24/7,” Darvish said. “It was his entire identity, and that’s why it was so difficult for him when it was taken away.”
The jury award comes amid a rare wide-open governor’s race that includes the head of the Sheriff’s Department, Chad Bianco, who is a leading GOP candidate for the seat. Bianco has staked his campaign on his lengthy career in law enforcement, which spans more than three decades, including serving as the elected sheriff of Riverside County since 2019.
Although high-ranking Sheriff’s Department officials were involved in Lodes’ case, Darvish said there was no evidence presented at trial that Bianco had direct knowledge of his client’s mistreatment. Bianco was not a defendant in the lawsuit. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Darvish argues that the case points to a departmental culture of covering up allegations of misconduct.
“When there’s a harassment complaint made against the captain and they never investigated, and they pressure someone to resign and withdraw the complaint,” he said, “then that’s a systemic issue.”
The retaliation began after Lodes, a 25-year veteran of the department, formally reported workplace harassment with human resources in March 2022, according to the complaint.
Lodes had been called mentally ill in front of his peers by a captain during a promotability meeting around October 2021. A few months later, he found degrading posters of his head on a child’s body shoved inside his uniform pockets and gun holster and plastered over the station walls, according to the complaint.
The department responded to his harassment report by launching an investigation into Lodes unlawfully using informants and threatening him with possible criminal prosecution, according to Darvish.
The jury agreed that these allegations were a manufactured excuse to cover up unlawful retaliation.
Within days of filing the workplace harassment complaint, a Internal Affairs sergeant packed Lodes’ personal belongings in a box and drove them to his house, according to the complaint. The sergeant spent hours pressuring Lodes, then 47, to accept early retirement.
The following day, Lodes was told to meet with a high-ranking official in the Sheriff’s Department in a Del Taco parking lot who instructed him to resign immediately and withdraw his harassment complaint.
The $2.25-million award in the civil case will come from the county’s coffers.
The award casts renewed scrutiny on Bianco’s Sheriff’s Department two weeks before primary election ballots land in Californians’ mailboxes.
He was also in the spotlight in March after seizing more than 650,000 ballots from the November election as part of an investigation to determine if they were fraudulently counted. He put the investigation on hold shortly before the California Supreme Court halted it pending further review.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
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