Married to a battalion chief. Sister of a fire captain. A news career that included seven years at KFMB radio and TV. A sterling resume with stints running SANDAG’s PR shop and speaking for SDG&E.
When Colleen Windsor began work in January 2019 at the Orange County Fire Authority, she considered it a dream job.
But 19 months later, she was gone — allegedly forced out of her role as director of communications by what she describes as a nightmarish pattern of sexist attacks.
In October 2021, after filing a discrimination complaint with the state, Windsor sued in Orange County Superior Court.
“The harassing conduct of the Defendants … was continuous, severe and pervasive,” says her 18-page lawsuit. “Any reasonable woman in Windsor’s circumstances would have considered the work environment to be hostile, intimidating, offensive, oppressive or abusive.”
The San Diego resident named the Irvine-based fire agency and 11 individuals — but not OCFA Fire Chief Brian Fennessy, who previously led the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department for 2 1/2 years.
But Fennessy, part of a five-person panel that hired Windsor, is quoted in the suit as saying: “This wouldn’t be happening to you if you weren’t a woman.”
Among other things, Windsor, 58, says she was the victim of:
- “Incendiary e-mails” sent to her and circulated departmentwide as well as instructions to ignore Windsor’s e-mail or written communications.
- Being falsely accused of swerving her car at people in the parking lot of OCFA headquarters in an effort to injure them.
- Being falsely accused of racism to undermine her authority on the job.
- And being castigated inside a fire station and in front of several male firefighters as a “f—ing bitch.”
She also was the subject of derisive “memes” and was wrongly accused of a series of unprofessional acts, the suit says.
“Texts, photos, videos and memes continue to be sent around the job by the individual Defendants,” says the suit, noting that Windsor and her downtown San Diego attorney, Christopher C. Saldaña, were rebuffed on public records requests.
“The OCFA’s refusal was not explained by reference to legal authority, but basically dared the Plaintiff to seek this information and these documents by request for production or subpoena,” says the suit, which asks for general, special and punitive monetary damages.
A lawyer for OCFA didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Chief Fennessy didn’t immediately answer questions via email and voice mail. (He hailed Windsor’s hiring in a tweet of January 2019.)
But the OCFA answered the complaint Dec. 3, 2021, with an eight-page brief denying “generally and specifically each and every material allegation contained in the Complaint” and said Windsor suffered “no injuries, damages or loss by reason of any act or omission.”
Kevin Osterberg, attorney for OFCA, also wrote that Windsor “failed to act reasonably to avoid and/or mitigate her alleged damages.” And if she was hurt, it was due to her own negligence.
Windsor, he said, “voluntarily consented to, and participated in, the conduct alleged in
the Complaint.”
Now working for the North County Transit District, Windsor told Times of San Diego that she got no support when she went to Lori Zeller, deputy chief of administration and support at OCFA.
“I couldn’t tell you why Lori Zeller did not help me,” said Windsor, the OCFA’s first female communications chief. “I can only tell you that when I went to Lori Zeller with my claims of harassment, she told me there was no mechanism for me to file a complaint since I was on the executive management team, which is not true and not the law as I understand it.”
Zeller, a 25-year agency veteran, is not named in the suit, which alleged that OCFA has a “well-documented history of chauvinism and misogyny and has recently been the subject of several suits alleging, as here, gender discrimination.”
One recent example is veteran helicopter pilot Desiree Horton, who was terminated in 2020 after a year’s probationary period and allegedly labeled “untrainable.” Horton sued in June 2021 to get her job back.
A petition on Change.org signed by more than 1,800 people says Horton was “ignored, undermined, disrespected, disparaged and made to feel as though she was incompetent, all because Ms. Horton was a woman in a place believed to be a man’s world.”
Windsor made similar remarks in an interview with City News Service.
In December, she was quoted as saying: “I would say at the core it is probably an agency from the 1940s or ’50s. They don’t respect women. They don’t respect women in any type of authority.”
Times of San Diego wrote to several dozen female PR executives in San Diego County for comment on the Windsor suit, but only one responded on condition of not being identified.
The woman — a former public-agency director of communications who now advises public and private agencies as a consultant — says she believes Windsor’s allegations but has not run into such behavior herself.
“Every workplace is different, but I’ve worked with loads of law enforcement agencies, fire and police, closely, and I’ve never experienced that kind of situation,” said the PR veteran. “Just because I didn’t experience, it doesn’t mean that she didn’t.”
But based on Windsor’s impressive career arc — including the San Diego Association of Governments and at San Diego Gas & Electric Co. — the PR veteran said: “It sounds to me like she came into this organization that wasn’t used to having a real professional run their PR.”
At the San Diego organizations, she said, “they expect you to have formal strategic plans and … write things all out. It’s not just seat of the pants…. Reading between the lines on her complaint, it looks like she came into this very loosey-goosey operation, and she’s trying to professionalize it.”
The PR veteran says Windsor may have encountered people who would say: “Oh, really? That’s not my job. Really, you want me to do a backup PIO duty? Sorry, lady, that’s not going to happen.”
The consultant says the suit gave her a strong suspicion that a male in the same job without firefighting experience might have had a similar reception as Windsor, who is married to San Diego Fire-Rescue battalion chief Erik Windsor.
“But perhaps being a woman had something to do with it as well,” she said. “Because obviously you’re outnumbered. And you don’t necessarily have a lot of female allies.”
The PR consultant rejects the notion that Windsor was describing a hazing culture.
“No way, no way,” she said in a phone interview. “This is not hazing. This is bullying.”
The memes Windsor notes (but doesn’t specify) in her complaint may be gallows humor common to public safety agencies, the local consultant said.
“What would have happened if she had laughed at it good-naturedly?” The consultant said. “I don’t know. That could have been a culture thing. I guarantee that at SDG&E you’re not doing memes of each other.”
Windsor flatly rejects the consultant’s take on pushback over unwanted professionalism.
“I disagree,” Windsor said Thursday. “Despite the incredible success that my team brought to the OCFA communications section, I was targeted because I was a strong, knowledgeable female in an authoritative position who had male fire captains reporting to me, which was resented jobwide because of my gender.”
Windsor speculated that the PR professional contacted for this report hasn’t worked in an environment like hers before.
“I was relentlessly mistreated and labeled with mysogynistic names to the point that the fire chief himself stated to me this would not be happening to me if I were a man,” Windsor said.
No trial date has yet been sent, but Judge David Hoffer is handling the case.
Last week, Windsor attorney Saldaña said monetary damages being sought are “extensive both due to Mrs. Windsor’s job loss and the significant emotional injury to which she was purposefully subjected.”
As to the 11 named defendants, he said, requested damages are likely to be “quite substantial.”
He added: “We reached out to OCFA prior to filing the lawsuit and asked them to consider settlement discussions or to engage in pre-filing mediation. Unfortunately, nothing came of our discussions and OCFA has made no offer to settle the case despite being fully aware prior to filing of the allegations we were making and having access itself to evidence substantiating Colleen’s claims.”
Saldaña called the case important because “no one deserves to be harassed into constructive termination” by firefighters who society affords a “special and exalted place.”
“And certainly, it’s reprehensible that these folks would do so merely because of a co-worker’s gender,” he said. “Worst of all, no public agency should countenance that kind of conduct, as OCFA did, by acknowledging the problem but burying their head in the sand for fear of upsetting a midcentury status quo.”
