Friday, April 08, 2011

Akin Gump: Job Termination -- Contemporaneous Notes (November 1991)

Attached is the text of handwritten notes, apparently a draft of a letter to my sister, that I appear to have written within about a week of my job termination on October 29, 1991 by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where I was employed as paralegal from March 1988 to October 1991. Observe that the notes omit any reference to a final job evaluation prepared by my supervisor Chris Robertson in late October 1991, days after I lodged a harassment complaint against her. This corroborates that I was not aware that the firm had prepared an apparently retaliatory job evaluation of my work performance in late October 1991. I only learned about that job evaluation on December 23, 1992 upon my receipt of Akin Gump’s interrogatory response filed with the D.C Department of Human Rights (which the firm filed on May 22, 1992).

Dear Stell,

Attached are my 6 job evaluations covering the period May 1988 - May 1991. They speak for themselves.

I’m drawing up a list of incidents. Here are two.

1. People said that I simply imagined that there were rumors about me because I was hypersensitive.

--On May 3, 1989 at a firm dinner at a hotel -- The Westin -- I was seated next to a legal assistant named Jesse Raben. I asked him, “Have you heard the rumor about me at the firm?” He said, “You mean the rumor that you’re a homosexual? Yea, I heard about that.”

(On the issue of recent fabrication, I told Craig about what Jesse Raben said at lunch with Craig on Sept. 18, 1990.)

One of the supervisory employees [J.D. Neary] said he couldn’t work with me because I was difficult to work with, that I was hypersensitive.

--When I was terminated I remained totally calm and rational.

-- I believe that in April 1990, management in an attempt to test this guy out, told him he was being fired just to see how he would react. When he was told he was being terminated, he went berserk and got hysterical.

Many, many more incidents.
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