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Woman claims she was fired for saying ‘harassment’ wasn’t Suit alleges vendetta against state co-worker BY CHRIS BRISTOL Was a state employee fired for refusing to file a sexual harassment complaint against a male co-worker, or was she let go for reasons more mundane? One man will decide. Trial got under way Wednesday morning in the courtroom of Jackson County Judge Philip Arnold, who must evaluate the merits of Laurie Thorson's lawsuit against the state Support Enforcement Division and former Medford branch manager Merry Larsen. Thorson, a Jacksonville resident and single mother of a 12-year-old boy, contends she was illegally fired in 1997 from a clerical position she held for five months as a trainee. She seeks more than $200,000 in lost wages for wrongful discharge and violation of whistleblower laws. Most civil trials are decided by juries, but not this one. The defense exercised its legal right to a bench trial, a sign of the times given the unpredictable nature of juries and potential for huge awards. In opening statements Wednesday, veteran Medford attorney Lee Werdell argued that his client Thorson was the unwitting victim of a vendetta against the co-worker led by Larsen and a supervisor named Diane Vicklund. The co-worker touched Thorson on the arm one day, and even though Thorson had not been offended, Vicklund and Larsen tried to exploit the incident to get rid of the man, Werdell said. Worse yet, when Thorson refused to go along with it, they turned on her, Werdell said. Although Vicklund was later demoted for misconduct, Werdell said Larsen never forgave Thorson and eventually cooked up a pretext to fire her despite high marks for clerical proficiency. But defense counsel David Landrum, a state Department of Justice attorney from Salem, argued that no evidence of retaliation existed and that Larsen was unaware of any threats Vicklund may have made. Thorson, he said, claims she "refused to do something nobody asked her to do." Moreover, he questioned why Thorson took six weeks to report the incident. Both attorneys had differing versions of the convoluted sequence of events that characterized Thorson's final weeks on the job. "If it was so terrible," Landrum said, "why didn't she report it then? I don't know why, but she didn't." Instead, he said Thorson was fired for cause after repeated warnings that she was too chatty, spent too much time visiting with busy co-workers and was a "little resistant" to some training requirements. He conceded, however, that Thorson was an efficient clerk. Support Enforcement investigates and collects child support for families on welfare and other forms of public assistance. It is a division of the Department of Justice, with branch offices throughout the state. Central to the lawsuit was the arm-touching incident. According to Werdell, the incident occurred on a warm July workday not long after Thorson was hired. She had worn a sleeveless summer dress to work, which caught the attention of the co-worker. Werdell said the co-worker touched Thorson on the arm and make a crack about "showing skin." The man then explained to Thorson that she was violating an unofficial dress code enforced by Vicklund. Concerned whether this was true, Thorson asked another co-worker, who then advised her to ask Vicklund about it directly. But Vicklund immediately pounced on the arm-touching anecdote, telling Thorson she had been sexually harassed and demanding that she file a complaint. Werdell said Vicklund disliked the employee and was eager to fire him. When Thorson objected, Werdell said, and said she had not been offended, Vicklund pressed the matter to the point that she actually threatened to fire Thorson for not cooperating. The matter soon came to the attention of Larsen, who also insisted the co-worker had sexually harassed Thorson and went so far as to reprimand the employee in writing. Larsen never explicitly threatened to fire Thorson. Werdell argued that she nevertheless lied repeatedly about her role in the matter and looked for any excuse to fire Thorson before her six-month probation was over. "Judge, I'm going to prove to you that Merry Larsen's testimony is not to be trusted in any way," he said. "She is not credible." Werdell said the male employee later filed a grievance over the disputed arm-touching matter and that the letter of reprimand from Larsen was eventually removed from his personnel file. Also, he said more than half of the 26 employees of the Medford Support Enforcement office signed a petition in support of Thorson, including acting branch manager Jim Barringer. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA