Allegheny County's former top public defender filed a lawsuit Tuesday, alleging she was wrongfully terminated.
Lena Bryan-Henderson was fired last month after an investigation into claims that she made offensive comments to co-workers. But in the suit, filed in the Court of Common Pleas against county manager John Fournier, Bryan-Henderson claims those allegations are "bogus" fabrications by disgruntled employees.
The complaint describes contentious relationships with top-level staff — some of whom Bryan-Henderson accuses of having wanted her job themselves — over work hours and personal comportment.
But the report compiled after the investigation of those complaints is "rife with factual inaccuracies, absurd conclusions, and slanderous uncorroborated accounts," the filing says. "The report contains numerous allegations that are unsubstantiated and often contradicted by facts."
The filing asks a judge to reinstate Bryan-Henderson to the post of chief public defender.
County spokesperson Abigail Gardner and Bryan-Henderson's attorney, Joseph J. Pass, both declined to comment Tuesday afternoon.
Bryan-Henderson was appointed in January 2024 by County Executive Sara Innamorato, just weeks after Innamorato took office. She was the first Black woman to serve as the county's chief public defender.
But she "was not put in a position to be successful," the complaint charges. Bryan-Henderson claims her changes to the office faced pushback from the younger, predominantly white leadership as well as more junior employees who "wanted to maintain the status quo."
The accounts of current and former staff in the office who spoke to WESA, and a message Bryan-Henderson shared with supporters in April denying inappropriate behavior, suggest there were tensions surrounding her leadership, including questions about her approach to staff and her managerial skill.
In the lawsuit, Bryan-Henderson said that she received little support from the executive branch, with no training or guidance on her new position, and that she faced constraints her predecessors didn't experience.
Among other issues cited, the lawsuit contends that county administrators rejected Bryan-Henderson's choice for chief deputy public defender and directed her to instead hire Andy Howard for the position.
Howard is currently leading the office on an interim basis.
Bryan-Henderson alleges some of the same staff who hamstrung her initiatives colluded to file false complaints "in an effort to forcibly remove" her from the position. The suit contends that the allegations, and the report based on them, "rest heavily on harmful racist and sexist stereotypes," with claims she was "out of her depth" as chief public defender, despite her three decades of experience in the office.
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