Cambridge spent years — and $1.4 million — hiding harassment claims against high-profile police officer - The Boston Globe (2024)

Now public documents obtained by the Globe detail for the first time what Cambridge officials wanted to keep hidden: The city quietly settled with three female Cambridge police officers who had accused a high-profile sergeant of sexual harassment, including allegedly sending inappropriate messages, creating a hostile work environment, and retaliating against them when they complained.

The women said in sworn complaints filed with the state that their harasser was Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley, the white officer who made national headlines 15 years ago this summer when he arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is Black, at his Cambridge home. The incident sparked a national uproar about policing and race, and Crowley and Gates were invited by then-president Obama to the White House to make peace at a “beer summit.”

Crowley strongly denies the sweeping harassment and retaliation allegations and said he first learned of many of the claims against him from a Globe reporter. He remains a sergeant on the force.

Cambridge officials justified keeping the $1.4 million payout under wraps because they said it was necessary to protect the identities of the accusers.

But several councilors said the unusual level of secrecy left them ill at ease.

“It’s $1.4 million of taxpayer money that could have gone to any number of things,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, one of two councilors who voted in December 2020 against the payment. “The public should have known what it was going for, and the council wasn’t given the details. The public weren’t given the details. And I still don’t understand why.”

Earlier that year, the women had filed complaints about Crowley’s alleged behavior with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. The city settled so quickly that the state never finished investigating their claims. The heavily redacted settlement agreement that the Globe obtained through a public records request indicates the city did not admit wrongdoing. The agreement also contained a confidentiality clause.

The women declined interview requests through their lawyer, Ellen Zucker, a top attorney who has successfully obtained large discrimination settlements for her clients from cities, including Cambridge. Zucker wouldn’t comment directly on the allegations her clients made.

“They resolved their differences with the city,” Zucker said in a statement on the women’s behalf, “and were heartened by the city’s willingness to listen and to recommit to a safe, unbiased, and non-retaliatory work environment for them and for all of [the city’s] employees.”

The Globe is not naming them because it does not publicly identify people who make sexual harassment allegations without their consent.

City spokesperson Jeremy Warnick confirmed that the state complaints obtained by the Globe are the ones that led to the $1.4 million payment in 2020.

In an interview, Crowley called the allegations “bogus” and “outrageous.” He said the women “never faced discrimination from me directed at them and I never saw anybody else discriminate against any of those women.”

He said that the $1.4 million payout was made without his knowledge and that he and his colleagues only heard whispers such an agreement had been inked.

“Without speaking with me, this was settled for an exorbitant amount of money,” Crowley said. “I was shocked, because I figured, that’s got to be a rumor. That could never happen.”

Warnick said the city’s rationale for settling came after an internal Police Department investigation sustained some claims against Crowley, though he wouldn’t say what they were.

A heavily redacted 2019 report on that investigation, which the Globe obtained through Crowley’s lawyer, said fellow officers found he sent an inappropriate text message. The text, which Crowley does not dispute, was included a year later in the discrimination filing with the state.

In the text, Crowley wrote to a female colleague whom he had helped down from a fence after she’d gotten stuck on top of it during a foot chase. He said they “shouldn’t ignore the moment” they shared during the rescue and he had “saved [her] undercarriage from certain destruction and future baby making.”

For the text, Crowley said, he received a written reprimand. Subsequently, he was placed on a list of Middlesex County law enforcement personnel with potential credibility issues — called the “Brady” list — where he is one of four Cambridge officers who have had sexual harassment findings against them. Crowley disputes that the text he sent should be described as sexual harassment.

In the interview, he said the text was a joke to “lighten the mood” after a shared traumatic experience but acknowledged it was in poor taste.

“I have owned that mistake,” he said. “It was a learning experience for me.”

Crowley denies sending another text, which was included in the MCAD complaints against him but does not appear in the unredacted portions of the internal police report that his lawyer sent the Globe.

That alleged incident, one of the complaints says, came in a group chat with female officers supervised by Crowley, one of whom indicated that they would need snacks while spending a long time at a crime scene. In response, the filings say, he sent them “a picture of his crotch with the comment ‘Gotcha covered.’ ”

Crowley said he did not send that text or photo and has not seen any evidence that he did. He said he had never heard about those alleged messages until told about them by a Globe reporter.

It was not clear whether his department looked into that purported text. The city has declined to share the Police Department’s report on its investigation, citing pending litigation. Crowley and his union formally complained to the state’s Department of Labor Relations to obtain an unredacted copy of it; the effort was still pending as of this month.

MCAD itself did not weigh in on the legitimacy of the claims, a spokesperson for the agency said, as “the parties settled prior to the completion of the investigation.”

Elsewhere in the MCAD complaints, the women alleged he subjected them to gender discrimination, and they felt they were being undermined at work because they had spoken out.

“We have found the atmosphere and the conditions within the Police Department damaging, painful, and disappointing,” they wrote in 2020. “Not only has the department failed to remedy an atmosphere where gender stereotypes limit women’s roles and the perception of us at work, but also the department has failed to address the retaliatory conditions we have faced — and continue to face.”

Warnick, the city spokesperson, would not say if Cambridge changed any policies as a result of the alleged harassment. He said the city has since formed an office of equity and inclusion, whose first chief was hired last year. He also said the city hired an equity and inclusion investigator this year to probe complaints about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation.

Louis DePasquale, who was city manager at the time Cambridge made the payment, did not respond to voicemails requesting comment. Warnick said DePasquale was aware of the Globe’s story.

The current city manager, Yi-An Huang, was sworn in in September 2022. In a statement, the city said that Huang would continue to honor the confidentiality agreement related to the allegations and that he “recognizes the need to balance providing greater public transparency, protecting the privacy of complainants, and our broader legal operations.”

Crowley is represented through his union, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, by attorney Alan McDonald. McDonald is also counsel for the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents Boston Globe reporters and some editors.

Cambridge has made large payouts in discrimination cases before, notably in 2011 when it settled for nearly $4 million with two women — one a city lawyer and the other the head of the Cambridge Kids’ Council — who said they faced harassment and retaliation on the job. Citing privacy concerns, the city kept aspects of those payments secret as well until compelled by the state to release them.

That came after a multimillion-dollar payment to a third woman — the former head of the Police Review and Advisory Board— who alleged racial discrimination and retaliation and won a 2008 jury verdict against the city.

Zucker represented those women, too.

The Globe first learned of the $1.4 million payment through a public records request filed in March that sought records of payouts involving city employees that Cambridge made from 2019 through 2023. The city sent the Globe the redacted agreement about that payment, the largest of its kind during that time period, on the Friday before July 4.

Aside from the $1.4 million payment in 2020, three payouts in that time were to settle discrimination cases. All involved Cambridge Public Schools employees. One person was paid $35,000, another was paid $60,000, and another was paid $85,000. None of their names were redacted.

William Sinnott, who was the City of Boston’s top in-house lawyer for eight years, said he could not recall ever seeing a similar level of secrecy in a harassment case.

“I’ve never seen that, certainly not in Boston,” he said, referring to the Crowley case.

The fact that the settlement agreement had been redacted to exclude Crowley’s name, and even the department where he worked, is highly unusual, he said. He said public records law in most cases errs on the side of releasing information contained in settlement agreements.

The city in a statement said it was not influenced by Crowley’s national profile stemming from his 2009 encounter with Gates at the professor’s house.

The incident a decade and a half ago began when Crowley showed up to investigate a possible break-in at the address and wound up arresting the prominent Black academic, who had been trying to get into his own home after a trip abroad. Charges of disorderly conduct against Gates were dropped.

Obama initially said Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, but later said he regretted his “choice of words” and, famously, invited both men to the Rose Garden to hash out their differences over beers.

Cambridge police defended Crowley at the time and cleared him of wrongdoing. The incident is considered an important moment of Obama’s first term.

Zucker, the accusers’ lawyer, wouldn’t discuss the city’s rationale for secrecy but said women first responders who pursue discrimination complaints can need extra protection due to the nature of the work, which can include being side-by-side in dangerous situations with fellow officers whom they have accused of harassment.

“For women in law enforcement, the cost of coming forward and looking for meaningful change can be very high,” Zucker said.

Ellen Messing, another lawyer who has represented alleged discrimination victims but was not involved in this case, said she is sympathetic to the idea that withholding an alleged harasser’s identity could protect the identities of their accusers. But, she said, it also means the payments may not deter bad behavior, let others know they have recourse if the same thing happens to them, or reveal whether the alleged behavior is part of a pattern in the department.

“The fact that somebody thought the damage that was inflicted on fellow human beings was valued at $1.4 million suggests that there is a problem that somebody should solve,” Messing said.

Some city councilors have said they were told too little at the meeting in 2020 when they were asked to approve the payment, including what the nature of the harassment entailed, or who had been accused.

“By the time we were presented with this full vote, it’s like a fait accompli,” said then-councilor Quinton Zondervan, who voted in favor of spending the money but said he had reservations about it. “Voting ‘no’ would just mean that these victims wouldn’t get their settlement.”

After the 6-2 vote (one councilor voted present), Zondervan said he and other councilors talked about creating a policy that would require more details be given to them when allegations are made against police officers, but it never led to changes.

“I called for more transparency in the Police Department in general, and specifically around harassment and other malfeasance that occurs there,” Zondervan said. “That’s the problem with secrecy, right? We don’t even know [alleged harassment is occurring]. So how can we hold people accountable for allowing it to persist?”

Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.