Whistleblowers! Female Forestry Workers Face off with USDA!

Presented in coordination with Marcel Reid & the Whistlblowers Summit in Washington DC

Guests: Lesa Donnelly, Lawrence Lucas, & Denice Rice & Darlene Hall

Rape, molestation, humiliation are standard fare for women in the Forestry Service.  Finally, Congress seems willing to intervene.

From the Washington Post article:

In a scathing rebuke of the U.S. Agriculture Department, House members called its response to harassment claims filed by female wildfire fighters “incompetent” in an oversight hearing on Thursday. They also said a department reprimand that allowed a fire supervisor to quit with full benefits after groping a woman 20 times was “unacceptable.”

Firefighter Denice Rice’s testimony that the fire supervisor who repeatedly groped her was a known bully and “a womanizer to female employees for years and nobody did anything about it” was the focus of their anger. At the Eldorado National Forest where she works in California, about 200 miles north of Sacramento, “women were afraid to complain and the one who did report him ended up leaving the agency,” she said.

Rice said the supervisor told her that he had a dream in which they had sex, tried several times to lift her shirt and followed her to the bathroom. Her account tracked with behavior that other wildfire fighters for the Forest Service and other federal agencies described in interviews with The Washington Post for an article last month. Many of them asked that their names not be reported for fear of retaliation.