In the wake of racial bias allegations in the LAFD, some female firefighters are sharing stories of harassment
By Sandy Banks
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
Melissa Kelley thought she knew what she was getting into when she joined the Los Angeles Fire Department five years ago. Her grandfather had been a firefighter. She held a degree in fire science. She’d spent five years fighting fires with the California Department of Forestry.
She knew the firehouse could be an uncomfortable place for a woman. She’d heard that female recruits were drilled harder, judged more harshly and sometimes harassed and ridiculed.
“But I was willing to overlook all that,” Kelley said. “The dirty jokes, the porn, the frat boy stupidity. I didn’t care if I had my own bathroom. I just wanted to be part of the team.
“I wanted to be a firefighter so bad, I was willing to put up withalmost anything.”
Almost anything. She had two rules: “Do not touch me. Do not hurtme on purpose.”
The first rule was broken when she was a rookie, on the night shewas roused from sleep at the station when a firefighter climbed intoher bed.
“He tried to kiss me,” Kelley recalled. “I was so shocked, it tookme a second to figure out what was happening. I didn’t want to [angerhim], so I kept saying ‘Not right now, not right now.’ ”
He slid his hands under her clothes, promising “no one wouldknow.” When she resisted, he left and returned to his bed.
The next morning, he made no mention of the incident, Kelley said.But he taunted her for weeks, clucking like a chicken when she wasaround.
Kelley, 32, said nothing — to him or anyone else. “I thought,'Who am I going to tell?’ I didn’t want people to think I was acomplainer. People already assume you’re just on the job to find ahusband.
“My only recourse was to pretend like it never happened.”
A way to survive
For female firefighters in Los Angeles, whose stories are recordedin documents and interviews, pretending can be a survival tool.
Pretending you don’t mind being addressed as “Hey, girl"; that thecrude stories of prostitutes’ sexual exploits don’t bother you; thatyou find it amusing when someone in the fire station fills yourmouthwash bottle with urine or defecates in your shower stall.
In recent weeks, the Los Angeles Fire Department has been thefocus of renewed debate over whether it is a hotbed of racialdiscrimination. A harassment lawsuit by black firefighter TenniePierce — who was tricked into eating dog food by station mates — resulted earlier this month in a $2.7-million settlement. The payoutwas vetoed by the mayor and rescinded amid a public uproar overwhether the deed was an innocent prank gone wrong or a reflection ofracial animosity.
That debate became the catalyst for Fire Chief William Bamattre’sresignation Friday and spotlighted long-standing allegations ofhostility toward blacks in the department.
Now some female firefighters are stepping out of the shadows.
Women are a tiny fraction of the department, numbering 95 out ofits 3,625 firefighters. They are newcomers — the first femalefirefighter was hired in 1985 — to a field steeped in tradition andlong considered the domain of men.
Many of the stories they tell never make it into official reports.Some women say they have been afraid to share incidents, even withone another. Most are loath to complain because in the firehouse,reputation is everything.
“You want to have a solid, iron-clad reputation: You’re a hardworker, a team player,” said Capt. Alicia Mathis, a 17-year veteranand one of 19 female captains.
But women are beginning to break that silence; the “go along toget along” ethos has begun to crack.
In September, firefighter Ruthie Bernal was paid $320,000 by thecity to settle a sexual harassment and battery lawsuit, in which shealleged that her captain made continual sexual requests, tried tokiss her and treated her harshly when she rejected him.
A lawsuit filed by firefighter Brenda Lee, alleging that she washarassed and discriminated against as a woman and a lesbian, isslated for trial next spring.
And Mathis, 40, has laid the groundwork for a class-action lawsuiton behalf of women by filing a complaint with the CaliforniaDepartment of Fair Employment and Housing, alleging genderdiscrimination, a hostile work environment, harassment andretaliation.
“Almost every female firefighter on the LAFD has suffered unwantedtouching, leering or derogatory comments,” her complaint contends. “Adildo was put in a women’s locker, a female firefighter was told tosleep in a closet, and women have often been referred to as’bitches.’ ”
Earlier this year, an audit of the department by City ControllerLaura Chick found widespread perceptions of discrimination. More than80% of female firefighters surveyed said they were personally awareof or had experienced sexual harassment.
Chick’s findings suggest little has changed since a 1994 auditfound that 40% of female recruits failed to graduate from academytraining — twice the rate for men — and those who did were oftentargeted for harassment.
Back then, public outrage was triggered by a controversialvideotape mocking female firefighters. Dubbed “Female Follies,” thetape — filmed by male training officers and circulated among firestations — portrayed female recruits struggling with physical tasks,interspersed with snippets of footage showing men handling those jobswith ease.
Fire Department managers defended it as a “bloopers-like tape"intended to be humorous. City officials blasted it as humiliatingevidence of institutional sexism intended to ridicule and discouragewomen.
Part of the culture
Hazing and pranks have long been a part of firehouse culture.Chick’s audit found that almost two-thirds of firefighters hadparticipated in or witnessed hazing, ranging from stuffing cake intoa captain’s work boots to dumping a bucket of cold water on anunsuspecting rookie to shaving the genital area of a firefighterabout to be married.
Some female firefighters say they appreciate the role thatlighthearted pranks play in building camaraderie. But what happens tothem has a harder edge, they say, and is occasionally physicallythreatening.
“This is not ‘boys will be boys’ stuff,” said Genie Harrison, thelawyer representing Mathis, Pierce and three other firefighters — one female, two male — who recently won settlements on harassmentclaims.
“You get into bed with a woman and start to physically assaulther, that’s not a prank — that’s an attempted rape.”
Like Kelley, Mathis remembers being accosted in bed as a rookie inthe middle of the night. She blocked it from her mind, she said,"until I saw the guy 10 years later, when I was a captain, and Ithought, ‘Oh my God, I never said anything.’
“You think, ‘That was just me. I got out of it and made my way andI was fine.’ Now I wonder what happened from that time on.”
Experts say women integrating into all-male professions often feelconfused about how to handle harassment.
“Some women go along with it, trying to out-muscle the guys withtough talk,” said Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske. “Othersare intimidated by it, collapse and quit.
“But the most common reaction to sexual harassment is not to tellanybody at work.”
‘Locker-room stuff’
In the firehouse, the conflict between men and women isexacerbated by circumstance, culture and history.
Firefighters’ 24-hour on-duty stints require them to livetogether, and most women are the only females in their crews. Everyfirehouse now has separate locker rooms and bathrooms for women — arequirement Bamattre mandated during his tenure. Some stations offerseparate sleeping areas; in others, women share the dorm with men.
Resentment sometimes flows from those accommodations. Allowingwomen in the inner sanctum means ceding bathroom space, toning downrough language, hiding racy magazines. Some male firefighters admitthey relish “female-free” days, when no women are around.
“It means they can do locker-room stuff,” like bragging aboutsexual exploits and peering down from the firetruck at attractivewomen in passing cars, said one male fire captain, who did not wantto be identified because he fears being ostracized.
Some resistance to women is rooted in concerns about thephysically demanding nature of the job. Firefighters have to lift200-pound ladders, pull heavy lengths of hose and climb stairswielding giant power tools. One in three female recruits washes outof the department’s grueling 17-week training program, compared withone in 10 male candidates.
But many female — and some male — firefighters contend women areridden harder than men.
“There are still quite a few firefighters who don’t believe womenbelong,” said Fire Commissioner Genethia Hudley-Hayes. “Firefightersare manly. Women are suspect. ‘Why would she want to do this?’ Butthey don’t ask a guy why he wants to be a firefighter.”
As the focus of the fire service changes — only 20% of fire callstoday involve structural or brush fires, and 80% are medicalemergencies — factors other than physical prowess become important.
“Sometimes issues [in the community] escalate and you face aconfrontation-type thing,” said Fire Capt. Christopher Cooper. “My female firefighters will step in, and I go, ‘Whew.’ They have asoothing way of de-escalating a situation. With them, it’s not an egothing.”
He doesn’t believe most male firefighters aim to intimidate orisolate women. But he agrees that women are sometimes evaluated bystandards that have less to do with safety than with tradition.
“I’ve seen it [when I ride] with countless women. They see apothole, they won’t swerve. They’ll run right over it and won’t thinkanything of it. Ninety-nine percent of men I ride with will try toavoid it; they’ll swerve, steer the truck around it.
“There are supervisors who will say [to the women], ‘I want you torun around those potholes,’ “Cooper continued.” 'If you don’t, I’mgoing to evaluate you as a substandard driver.’ That’s how the wholeprocess starts — the hostile work environment.
“One of the biggest problems when you’re working with women: Guystry to make them into men.”
A sobering drill
Outside of Fire Station 27 in Hollywood stands a statuecommemorating the sacrifices of Los Angeles firefighters. There, Melissa Kelley, immortalized in bronze and holding a fire hose,stands among four male firefighters.
But the petite, ponytailed blond may never “man” a fire lineagain.
Two years ago, on a routine training drill known as the"Humiliator,” Kelley was assigned to hoist a 180-pound ladder, climbit while clutching a giant rotating saw and then cut through awindow’s metal bars. She was exhausted — having just returned from afire run — but confident. She had done a similar drill the daybefore.
But when she tried to swing the ladder around, she dropped it,"180 pounds, on top of my head,” she recalled. She tried to lift it, but her helmet was wedged between its rungs. Her shoulder wasthrobbing, and she could not lift her arm.
“In my head I’m thinking, ‘I’m dying. My arm is messed up. My backis hurting. My legs are going to give out if I don’t get this ladderoff me.’
“From the moment I realized I was stuck I thought, ‘OK, I’m partof a team. They’re going to help me, right?’ ” But when onefirefighter moved toward her to help, the station captain ordered himback.
“Everybody was just standing there screaming and cussing at me,"Kelley recalled. “No one came to my aid. At all.”
She managed to throw the ladder off and finish the drill, shesaid, her injured arm pinned to her chest.
Later, a female officer took her to the hospital. She had torn arotator cuff, damaged four discs in her back and three in her neck. She would need surgery and months of rehabilitation. Kelley, nowworking as a dispatcher, may never return to fighting fires.
At the time, Chief Bamattre blasted the captain’s conduct andsuspended him for two days without pay. But the captain appealed, anda Board of Rights panel of department officers reduced his penalty toa written reprimand.
“That’s less than you get for losing a radio,” Kelley saidbitterly. But that’s not what hurts her the most. It’s thehumiliation she felt standing there, struggling and failing,obviously in pain, surrounded by men she considered brothers, with noone offering her a hand.
“We help bums, we help blacks, whites, old people, strangers. Itdoesn’t matter what their social status is,” she said, her eyeswatering at the memory.
“Those were my teammates They would help a dog pinned under aladder. But they wouldn’t help me.”