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‘I have never felt more attacked’: Employee sues Canyon sheriff, claims discrimination

Aleshea Lind Boals built the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office Victim Witness Unit in 2006 from the ground up. Now she is suing the office and Sheriff Kieran Donahue.

Boals not only founded the first such unit for the county, but also developed protocols and an operating procedure, her lawsuit says.

It also says Boals endured harassment and discrimination from her supervisors and Donahue based on her gender, and was retaliated against for reporting gender discrimination and illegal activity about how deputies treated female victims.

Boals worked as a victim-witness coordinator for the county for 15 years until she was fired in January. Victim-witness coordinators help detectives investigating abuse and sexual assaults by contacting and interviewing victims and providing crisis intervention.

According to her lawsuit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Boise, Sheriff’s Office policy states that the office will “strive to minimize the trauma experienced by victims.” That did not happen in some cases, Boals claimed.

Donahue did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Joe Decker, county spokesperson, was unavailable Friday.

Detective mistreated rape victims, Boals says

Boals said one detective, Mark Taylor, mistreated female victims, who make up the vast majority of sexual assault and domestic violence victims nationwide and in Canyon County.

“Det. Taylor generally chose to blame female victims and not believe their reports of assault or abuse,” said the lawsuit, which was first reported by Idaho News 6.

Boals also claimed that Taylor failed to include victim-witness coordinators in his investigation process, even though it is standard protocol.

In the fall of 2020, Boals’ lawsuit said, Taylor chose not to believe a victim who said she had been raped by someone she knew, despite having defensive wounds. The lawsuit said the suspect said they had consensual sex.

According to the lawsuit, “During the interview, Det. Taylor yelled at the victim for supposedly lying, and he told her that he was closing her case because her vagina was too small to have been raped. The victim left the interview in tears, and she refused to participate further in the investigation and prosecution of her case.”

Boals said this treatment was different than the way she saw Taylor treat male victims of sexual abuse. According to the lawsuit, Taylor spoke to one male victim frequently on the phone and drove out of state to visit him and buy him food, clothes and other gifts.

Again, in March 2021, Boals claimed she had worried about the way Taylor was treating another female victim of child sexual abuse. According to her lawsuit, Taylor interviewed the minor victim alone, which goes against Canyon County policy that detectives are not supposed to interview minor victims of sexual abuse when the victim is of the opposite sex.

Without Boals’ knowledge, the lawsuit said, Taylor closed the case, and when Boals asked why, he said the girl was “lying her little butt off.”

Boals brought her concerns about Taylor to Sgt. Doug Gately, Boals’ supervisor. According to the lawsuit, Gately yelled at Boals, saying, “Do you think you’re a detective?”

She raised her concerns up the chain of command, the lawsuit said, by informing Lt. Charles Gentry, who told her it was the detective’s choice how to investigate claims.

It turned out that the girl Taylor accused of lying was not lying, according to the lawsuit. The alleged suspect came to the station and confessed to raping her, the lawsuit said.

Donahue gets involved

Boals did not stop her complaints. She sent an email to Donahue saying Taylor was violating victims’ rights. After that, the lawsuit said, Gately and Gentry started to harass, discriminate and retaliate against Boals by setting limitations on her and inhibiting her ability to serve victims.

On Oct. 3, 2021, the lawsuit said, Boals sent another email to Donahue outlining the retaliation and harassment she said Gentry and Gatley subjected her to.

“I continue to wonder if CCSO is attempting to get rid of Victim Services [and I] have wondered if [my] supervisors were trying to encourage [me] to resign,” Boals wrote, according to the lawsuit.

Boals’ email continues: “I have never felt more attacked, I have never cried more tears and felt utterly devastated in the past 15 years at the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office than I have since March 2021. I realize that I will never be “one of the boys,” I am not on SWAT, I have no rank and I am a woman in a man’s world.”

The lawsuit said that after receiving Boals’ email, Donahue set up a meeting with the Canyon County Deputies Association, where he said Boals spent $10,000 of association money on a single victim, and where he told the association to “rein her in.” The lawsuit said the $10,000 claim was false and that Boals was not included in the meeting even though she was the president of the deputies association.

According to the lawsuit, Donahue responded to Boals by reprimanding her for not following the chain of command and not working at her desk during her work hours. Boals said in the lawsuit that she often works outside of her office with victims and other agencies.

Donahue later accused Boals of hosting an inmate birthday party, when according to the lawsuit, Boals had given a victim, who was in jail for drug possession, a brownie with a candle, because she knew it was the victim’s birthday the day before.

The lawsuit said Donahue told Boals that the “inmate birthday celebration” was “more than enough to justify the immediate for-cause termination of your employment.” He threatened a formal investigation and said he would force Boals to take a polygraph exam.

In the lawsuit, Boals said she had never been reprimanded for giving victims food before, and deputies often provide suspects with cigarettes and sodas to “help calm them down.”

On Nov. 1, 2021, the lawsuit said, Boals was on FMLA leave. While on leave she said she hired attorneys to try to negotiate an end to her employment. The effort was unsuccessful, the lawsuit said, and the sheriff’s office issued a termination letter to Boals effective Jan. 28.

Other claims of gender discrimination

The lawsuit alleges that Boals is not the only victim of gender discrimination in the Sheriff’s Office.

The lawsuit says that in September 2021, the Sheriff’s Office fired a female detective after she reported that Taylor was mistreating female victims and Gately and Gentry were minimizing victim services. The lawsuit said that detective was also undermined, micromanaged and scrutinized and disciplined for things she had not done.

“Sheriff Donahue and CCSO officials have a widespread practice of retaliating against women who report gender discrimination at work and gender bias in victim services,” the lawsuit said.

Boals’ lawyers, Erika Birch and Kass Harstad, of the Stringberg Scholnick Birch Hallam Harstad Thorne law firm in Boise, accuse Donahue and the Sheriff’s Office of employment discrimination, a hostile work environment, discriminatory discharge, unfair retaliation, and retaliating against a whistleblower.

According to the lawsuit and previous news coverage about Canyon County’s Victim Witness Unit, Boals was recognized and given awards for her work. In 2017, Canyon County Sheriff’s Office was given an award for its victim services program by the National Sheriff’s Association. KTVB reported in 2017 that the program saved a domestic abuse survivor’s life.

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