Fresno State stonewalled the release of sexual harassment investigation reports, sought NDA
For a year, California State University officials stonewalled the public release of investigation reports that described a pattern of sexual harassment, bullying and retaliation by a senior administrator at the CSU Fresno campus, documents obtained by Paste BN show.
CSU officials received a public records request from the CSU Employees Union seeking copies of the reports in November 2020, records show. The request came three months after then-Fresno State president Joseph Castro signed a settlement agreement with the administrator, Frank Lamas, that gave Lamas a clean record, $260,000 and a letter of recommendation from Castro.
California law requires public agencies to “promptly” disclose public records to anyone who asks to inspect them. But the CSU officials sat on the union’s request until November 2021. In the meantime, Fresno State’s lead attorney, Darryl Hamm, pushed union officials to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have prohibited them from sharing or discussing the contents of the reports with anyone.
The yearlong delay helped thwart a potential legislative audit examining alleged improper human resources and Title IX practices across the CSU, for which union officials had spent months gathering evidence. Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination, including sexual harassment and assault, in schools.
California Assemblymember Jim Patterson told Paste BN his office had been working with the union to craft such an audit request last spring. But the evidence they had at the time lacked specificity, he said, and the audit committee temporarily stopped hearing new requests because of COVID-19-related concerns.
Now, after reading Paste BN’s recent investigation detailing how Castro mishandled allegations against Lamas over a six-year span, Patterson, a Republican, said he immediately directed his staff to resume development of the audit proposal in light of the new information.
Read the full investigation: Cal State chancellor mishandled sexual harassment complaints as head of Fresno State
Castro is now chancellor of the entire 23-campus CSU system, a position to which he was named three weeks after signing the settlement agreement with Lamas in August 2020. He officially started his new role in January 2021.
“This is much deeper and much more precise information than what we were able to gather, and the thoroughness of it has now caused us to go back into our files,” Patterson told Paste BN. “It stains the university and the university system, and it calls into question how widespread this is. And so we're going to try to find that out in an audit.”
In response to questions from Paste BN, Hamm said the union's public records request took longer than expected to fulfill because of "unforeseen delays by both parties."
In a statement, Hamm said that "at no time" did the CSU system withhold records of the investigation from the union or the public. "Given that these records were highly sensitive, in order to help protect the privacy of the complainant and witnesses who participated in the investigation, (the union) and the university were aligned in agreeing to enter into a protective order."
But the protective order was Hamm's idea, and CSU Employees Union officials opposed it, emails provided to Paste BN by the union show. In a September 2020 email, an attorney for the union wrote Hamm, "I don’t think this protective order idea will work for us" and said the union would instead accept redacted versions of the reports. Hamm continued to insist on the order, emails show, and then twice extended his own deadline to provide the redacted copies, citing staffing shortages.
On Friday, Democratic state Sen. Connie Leyva, who chairs the California Legislature’s Senate Education Committee, and Democratic Assemblymember Jose Medina, chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, called for an independent investigation into Castro’s handling of the allegations against Lamas. Castro and CSU Board of Trustees Chair Lillian Kimbell said hours later that they would support such an investigation.
The legislative audit Patterson is proposing, however, would be far broader in scope, looking beyond just the Lamas case.
Done by the state auditor instead of a law firm, Patterson said, it would be as rigorous as earlier audits he has championed, including those of the state’s Employment Development Department, Department of Motor Vehicles and high-speed rail. It would cover not only Title IX and HR practices at Fresno State but also look at similar practices across as many as four other CSU campuses to compare them and determine whether problems have occurred elsewhere.
Patterson has represented Fresno in the California Legislature for nearly a decade. He is a former two-term Fresno mayor and a Fresno State alum.
“I’m embarrassed for my university,” Patterson said. “It brings me no joy to have to shine the spotlight of accountability into my own university and the university system, but the facts demonstrate it has to be done.”
Nondisclosure agreement
Patterson said his office had started planning an audit request in May 2021, when CSU Employees Union officials provided documents and a list of concerns about HR and Title IX practices at several CSU campuses.
The union first reached out to Patterson’s office about those issues about a year earlier, his spokesperson confirmed. Among the concerns: Campus HR departments were failing to adhere to hiring and training policies; students and employees who reported sexual misconduct were seeing their cases delayed or ignored by campus Title IX offices; and administrators found guilty of sexual harassment were not being adequately disciplined.
That last concern came directly from Terry Wilson, a former Fresno State student affairs analyst who worked under Lamas and said Lamas harassed him and others. After Wilson reported Lamas’ inappropriate behavior to HR and the Title IX director in 2014, he said, Lamas became hostile and gave him a negative performance review.
Fearing Lamas' actions were retaliatory, Wilson tried to transfer to another department later that year, but he said Lamas refused to approve his transfer request. Wilson had to reapply and reinterview for a new job in accounting services, which he viewed as a step down.
Five years later, Wilson participated as a witness in the Title IX investigation that led to Lamas’ departure from Fresno State. After Castro announced in August 2020 Lamas’ plan to retire at the end of the year, Wilson asked Fresno State officials to see the investigation reports. But according to Wilson, vice president of administration and chief financial officer Debbie Adishian-Astone told him he was “not privy to that information.”
The employees union then filed a formal public records request with Fresno State on Nov. 30, 2020, seeking copies of the reports. But emails show Hamm, Fresno State’s lead attorney, dragged out the request for almost a year.
Throughout much of the spring and summer, Hamm pushed Wilson and the union to sign a protective order as a condition of releasing the reports, according to emails and drafts of the order obtained by Paste BN. The initial order Hamm proposed included a nondisclosure agreement.
“The documents and their contents may not be disclosed, copied, distributed, shown, described, or read to any person or entity, including, but not limited to, media representatives,” an April draft of the order obtained by Paste BN reads.
Union officials pushed back, calling the order too restrictive. But Hamm dug in his heels.
“We absolutely need to have a protective order as part of the means for protecting the privacy interests that are at stake in this matter,” Hamm responded in an email in September. “The union’s interest is much more limited given the age of this case, the changes in harassment policies and the changes in management since this investigation was completed.”
The specificity necessary for a strong audit request, Wilson said, was in the reports. With university officials holding up their release, the information he could provide Patterson about the Lamas case was limited to Wilson’s personal experience.
“I needed those damn reports,” Wilson told Paste BN. “The reports were the bombshell, and they fought so hard to keep them from us.”
The union rejected the nondisclosure clause and threatened to sue the university for violating the public records law. Ultimately Hamm capitulated.
Fresno State provided redacted copies of the documents to the union in November 2021 – nearly a full year after its request. Paste BN obtained them and the settlement agreement through separate records requests the following month.
‘Beyond justification’
Published last week, Paste BN’s six-month investigation found Castro, Fresno State’s HR department and its Title IX office received at least 12 complaints about Lamas over six years. They included that Lamas stared at women’s breasts, touched women inappropriately, made sexist remarks, and berated, belittled and retaliated against employees. Lamas denies the allegations.
Castro personally received at least seven of the complaints, Paste BN’s investigation found. The university even installed a window in Lamas’ office in 2016 so he would not be alone with employees. But Castro never formally disciplined Lamas, records show, instead praising him in annual performance reviews and endorsing him for a prestigious lifetime achievement award, which Lamas won.
In October 2019, a doctoral student who worked full-time for Lamas filed a formal Title IX complaint against Lamas, alleging he sexually harassed her for nearly a year and implied he’d help her get promoted in exchange for sexual favors. In April 2020, the outside law firm the school hired to investigate her complaint found Lamas responsible for sexually harassing her and creating an abusive work environment, according to the investigation reports.
But rather than fire Lamas, Castro and then-chancellor Timothy White decided a settlement was the best way to avoid a potentially costly lawsuit from Lamas and ensure he would never again work for the university, Castro said in response to questions from Paste BN. As part of the settlement, Lamas agreed to retire from the CSU with full benefits, and Castro wrote him a letter of recommendation to help him find work elsewhere.
The CSU Board of Trustees promoted Castro to chancellor three weeks after the settlement. He now oversees Title IX compliance across all 23 CSU campuses and their more than half a million students and employees.
The university’s handling of the case is the latest example of how the CSU “creates its own inability to do what's right,” Patterson told Paste BN. That White signed off on the agreement, Patterson said, demonstrates the need for an audit to determine whether other CSU campuses have been handling problematic employees similarly.
“Something is really wrong with the system's operation if the system creates an outcome like this,” Patterson told Paste BN. “What does that say to the victims? What does that say about the university system? It’s more interested in protecting its executives than it is in protecting the employees and the women at the universities.”
The most “indefensible” aspect of the settlement agreement, Patterson said, is the letter of recommendation, which Castro has since said he regrets. In Patterson’s mind, it amounts to “a payoff and a reward.”
“How in good conscience can executives of the California State University system agree, after saying he'll never teach at the CSU again, to offer a letter of recommendation that this individual can use to get another job in a place where similar kinds of circumstances could transpire?” Patterson said. “It’s beyond justification.”
Patterson’s next step, he said, is preparing an audit request to submit to the Joint Committee on Legislative Audit for consideration. He is one of 14 assembly members and senators who sit on the bipartisan committee, which he said is “back in business” for the current legislative session.
Bolstered with the new information revealed by Paste BN’s reporting, Patterson said he expects the committee will approve the audit request.
“When you look at the shadows of the complaints that we got back then, and now your reporting, the blanks are really getting filled in,” Patterson said. “Now, with what we can add, I believe you’ll see that we’ll end up with a request that's pretty comprehensive. If history is any example, what we can expect out of the auditor will be a very specific set of recommendations to get these problems fixed.”