By Judy L. Randall
Staten Island Advance
Copyright 2007 Advance Publications, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — On Long Island, where she now lives, Judy Beyar is a soccer mom. She’s not recognized as a trail-blazing firefighter who felt she had no alternative but to quit after what she says were two decades of near-unrelenting hazing, harassment and discrimination.
“They peed in my boots,” she says of her male counterparts. “Glued shut the lock to my locker, so that I had to use a bolt cutter to open it to get my gear. They threw big boulders through my car windows. Slashed my tires. Repeatedly. Called me a lesbian. Or said that I was sleeping with everybody. Dumped buckets of water on my head, two or three times a tour.”
On Long Island, Ms. Beyar is not recognized as one of New York City’s history-making pioneers in what remains one of the last bastions of an old boys’ networks.
Of the city’s 9,023 fire fighters, just 21 are women. (In addition, there are four female lieutenants, one female battalion chief and one supervising fire marshal who is a woman, according to the FDNY press office.)
And in Ms. Beyar’s new hometown, nobody makes snide remarks - like the kind she believes she would have been subjected to had she remained on Staten Island - about the multi-million dollar civil lawsuit she lost earlier this month against the city, alleging FDNY brass had turned a blind eye to what she and her lawyer termed a hostile work environment that kept her from being given a position she was qualified for and triggered her resignation long before she intended.
They’re planning an appeal.
“I was ostracized in the Fire Department,” said Ms. Beyar, who lived in New Brighton until recently. “Ostracized in the community. Staten Island has such a big firefighter population. You know the story ‘The Scarlet Letter’? That’s what I felt like; I felt like the woman in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” (In his 1850 book, “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of a young woman who is forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her dress as punishment for an adulterous relationship.)
Added Ms. Beyar: “I had to leave Staten Island. The damage was done. The history was there. I need to just be me, and not, ‘Oh, there she is. That’s the firefighter who is complaining.’”
Which is one of the reasons why Ms. Beyar, a single parent for the last 11 years, moved to Rockville Centre, Long Island, last summer with her three daughters, 16, 15 and 13 years of age. To give herself a chance at a new beginning, and to give her girls - soccer stars all - a chance to play in the Women’s Premier Soccer League and a shot at the kind of college scholarships her eldest daughter has already been offered.
“I want my daughters to be independent, to have good self-esteem, to be able to speak up for themselves, to be team players but leaders at the same time,” explained Ms. Beyar, sitting in the small dining room of her modest house the other morning. “I felt team sports would do that for them. I don’t think any woman should ever have to go through what I went through.”
“I feel like the Fire Department took 25 years of my life,” she added, her Staten Island attorney, Thomas Bello, at her side. “It ruined my life. I want to close that door. I want to live again. I am a very capable woman.”
But she’s not willing to close the door until after the appeals process wends its way through the courts, something that could take 18 months.
Judith Murphy Beyar, 51, was born in New Dorp, one of seven children of Vera and Edmund Murphy, an attorney who once ran against long-time state Sen. John Marchi. The family would later move to Todt Hill.
Ms. Beyar went to Our Lady Queen of Peace School in New Dorp, ran CYO track, graduated from New Dorp High School, then went to Boston University to study English before transferring to St. John’s University on Grymes Hill.
In time she decided to take courses to become a court stenographer, then a legal secretary and thought about going to law school before being encouraged by her father to follow in the footsteps of her firefighter grandfather, James Murphy.
The year was 1978, the first time the FDNY permitted women to take the department’s written and physical qualifying exams. The physical test turned out to be unduly rigorous to keep female applicants from passing, the courts later determined after a class action suit was filed in 1982. Another test was given and 11 women, including Ms. Beyar, broke the gender barrier.
“I was always very athletic, very strong, very fast,” said Ms. Beyar, an accomplished marathon runner and scuba diver who has participated in triathlons. “I always liked a challenge. I was brought up believing that a woman can do what a man can do.”
“Going through the Fire Academy, training and studying for the job was challenging, interesting and I really enjoyed it,” said Ms. Beyar. “But it was clear they didn’t want us there. When I graduated, it was a fantastic feeling to say I made it through.”
The elation was short-lived. Ms. Beyar said the harassment began as soon as she was assigned to Engine 278 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. While male probationary firefighters usually experience a period of hazing from fellow firefighters, for Ms. Beyar there was no letup.
“They did everything,” said Ms. Beyar, “and it was every day. It never stopped. It was sick.”
They stole her gear or urinated on it, vandalized her car, doused her with water, called her names, put pornography on the TV whenever she entered the room.
She said her supervisors ignored her pleas to tell her fellow firefighters “to just please leave me alone.”
“I’d say to myself, ‘This is terrible, but I am not going to give up’,” she related. “I’m not a quitter. I just kept plugging away.”
But after two years of what she described as mental and physical exhaustion, she wound up in the hospital suffering from extreme stress.
In time, she was transferred to Engine 152 in Rosebank, where she described the work environment as better, if only because she “went from blatant harassment to underlying harassment.”
During that time, in 1990, she married a fellow firefighter who, she said, “never really believed that women should be in the Fire Department.”
They separated after six years, and divorced three years after that. But by then she was a single working mother of three young daughters.
With her family in mind she sought a more predictable work schedule, and in 1996 she became a special aide to the Division 8 commander in Concord, an office job that included managing the flow of reports, community liaison work and event planning.
Still, she said, the nasty comments and rude remarks continued.
“Sexual harassment runs in waves,” Ms. Beyar explained. “Something might not be said or done every day, but it is always there.”
By 1999, with then-Division 8 Commander and Deputy Chief Robert Mosier at the helm, Ms. Beyar said her treatment got worse, with Mosier regarding her as “nothing more than a secretary.”
He also nixed her request for what’s called a “24 spot,” a work schedule of one day on and three days off, which would have given her a shot at earning overtime, and included such responsibilities as driving the chief to fires and other emergencies.
“I was eligible and I was qualified and I was more senior than the male he put in that position,” said Ms. Beyar. “He just wanted to keep me in the office.”
In court - for much of Ms. Beyar’s discrimination claim against the FDNY revolved around her treatment under Mosier - Mosier said he relied on Ms. Beyar “to do the typing” and to make “the division look good.”
He also said he didn’t want Ms. Beyar as his driver because she had lost her “instincts” - something Ms. Beyar continues to vehemently deny.
Ms. Beyar said that after Mosier turned down her request for a change of assignment, he began to circumvent her on the job, her responsibilities started to dwindle and the negative comments about her increased.
Indeed, in her $10 million lawsuit, Ms. Beyar said Mosier’s condescending treatment of her made her fair game for verbal abuse and jokes from fellow firefighters.
“I was like a pin cushion,” she said the other day.
In June 2001, she filed an internal complaint.
“There was supposed to be confidentially, but there was none,” said Ms. Beyar. “Everyone knew about it. Then it was only given a perfunctory review.”
A year later, she filed another complaint, this one based on the sexual harassment she had endured, with the New York State Human Rights Commission. But there was a backlog of cases in the agency, and progress on her behalf was slow.
“I never filed complaints before that,” she explained, “because I didn’t want to seem like a hysterical woman.”
By 2005, physically and emotionally spent - “an outcast because of my gender” - Ms. Beyar retired.
Not long afterward, she contacted Bello, who would plead her case in Brooklyn federal court.
They said they were stunned when the jury rejected her claims after a five-day trial earlier this month.
They attribute the loss in part to the judge’s decision to limit the scope of the evidence presented, which prevented Bello from shining a light on the systemic abuse Ms. Beyar was subjected to over the years.
“The jury got it wrong,” said Bello. “I will keep fighting for her.”
Today, Ms. Beyar is unemployed, living off her pension, taking care of her daughters and taking care of herself, “trying to get healthy” with the help of a therapist.
“I need closure,” said Ms. Beyar, who hopes to write a book about her experience as a female firefighter in the New York City Fire Department.
But the years of sexual harassment and gender bias haunt her.
“Why can’t they just accept us?” asked Ms. Beyar. “Why do they keep ripping us apart?”