Sheryl Ferguson and Job Harassment at Akin Gump

I continue to believe that certain legal assistants made invidious references to my friendship with a male employee (Craig W. Dye) with whom I had previously worked at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson. At an Akin Gump dinner held in May 1989, another legal assistant (Jesse Raben, Esq.) acknowledged to me that he had heard a rumor that I was homosexual. See Brief of Appellee District of Columbia at 8.

Dye's supervisor at Hogan & Hartson during the period October 1986 to March 1987 was an individual named Sheryl Ferguson, a computer specialist. Ferguson left Hogan in the spring of 1987, and in about mid-year 1989 Dye assumed Ferguson's former supervisory position in that firm's Computer Applications Department.

In 1988 Akin Gump hired Ferguson, who by that time worked at ATLIS, a litigation support company, to perform, as a consultant, a study of Akin Gump's litigation support operation. Ferguson completed the consulting task in early 1989, and submitted a lengthy written report in February 1989. The report acknowledged the cooperation of Christine Robertson, Akin Gump's litigation support administrator, as well as several Akin Gump attorneys including John ("Jack") Gallagher and David Callet, senior partners who represented Eastern Airlines (the major client to which I was assigned), as well as an associate named David Tobin, who subsequently left the firm.

Ferguson had been my direct supervisor at Hogan & Hartson during the period September 1985 to March 1987. My Akin Gump supervisor Constance Brown, on her initiative, supplied me with a copy of Ferguson's written technical report, despite the fact that the report was stamped confidential and despite the fact that, according to Akin Gump, I was, as of February 1989, a dispensable temporary employee who had been hired to perform a specific time-limited clerical task for the client Eastern Airlines.

I continue to believe that Brown supplied me with a copy of the report knowing that the report was confidential, knowing that Ferguson had been my supervisor at another law firm, and anticipating that I would supply a copy of the report to persons I had worked with at Hogan & Hartson, which would have been an act of gross misconduct on my part. Eastern Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection a few weeks later, on March 9, 1989.

Perhaps as of February 1989 my employment at Akin Gump was perceived as vulnerable by certain employees who believed that a serious act of misconduct by me would result in my summary termination. But that's paranoid speculation. I like to think I was always one step ahead of the people who were trying to get me in trouble.