By Crescenzo Vellucci
The Vanguard Sacramento Bureau
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – An ex-Assistant San Francisco District Attorney who claimed former SF DA Chesa Boudin fired him in 2020 for retaliation and age discrimination had his case here in U.S. District Court dismissed this week when Judge Edward Chen ruled former ADA Thomas Ostly didn’t provide any evidence other than allegations.
Chen added, quoting King v. United Parcel Servc., Inc., where it stated that “subjective beliefs in an employment discrimination case do not create a genuine issue of fact; nor do uncorroborated and self-serving declarations.”
Commenting about a message from a “city employee” who called him a “fifty-year-old man acting like a clown” the judge said “the Tweet is not even disparaging Plaintiff for his age; rather, it is chastising Plaintiff for not acting at a maturity level equivalent to his age. Additionally, this single mention of Plaintiff’s age… does not qualify as harassment.”
Boudin fired Ostly along with multiple other employees when he took office in January, 2020. “The firings became one of the factors that enabled the June 2022 recall, fueled primarily by spurious allegations that Boudin was soft on crime,” according to Mission Local.
Mission Local added “the alleged retaliation stemmed in part from (Ostly’s) attempts to expose malpractice by the Public Defender’s Office, and claimed that Boudin — a former public defender — wanted to quash any investigation into the matter. He also claimed that a state bar complaint made against him by a public defender was retaliatory.”
Judge Chen, however, ruled Ostly, because he contacted the press about alleged public defender misconduct, cared more about his personal case than exposing “systemic malpractice.”
“This did not count as ‘protected speech,’ Chen ruled, adding there was no proof that Boudin ever “knew about … [Ostly’s] allegedly protected speech, let alone retaliated against it.”
Judge Chen’s ruling noted, “Defendants stated that Defendant Boudin actually fired Plaintiff because…Plaintiff ‘was not an attorney who adequately carried out the responsibilities’” (and) “A bar complaint had been filed against Plaintiff alleging a ‘pattern of misconduct’” comprising a failure to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence…a violation of the duty of candor, multiple violations of ‘the duty to respect the courts and judicial officers,’ and two instances of improper prosecution.”
Chen added, “Hence the record evidence, if anything, corroborates Defendants explanation of why Plaintiff was terminated. There is no evidence in the record that supports a contrary reasonable inference.”
Mission Local’s story said, “Lawsuits and criticism from former employees were among the allegations that culminated in Boudin’s removal from office a year ago…Among those outspoken former employees was Brooke Jenkins, who later became the district attorney. Other lawsuits remain pending….”Ostly often took to Twitter in 2022 to amplify the recall effort, as did a group of fellow attorneys opposed to Boudin’s policies.”
Boudin, who recently announced a job as head of a new Criminal Law & Justice Center at UC Berkeley a year after the recall, tweeted, “Justice at last…We all knew the allegations were frivolous from the beginning. Now that the court finally did a thorough review it shot down every single one of [Ostly’s] claims for lack of evidence.”
Mission Local wrote, “Chen’s 27-page order on Thursday bordered on cheeky, noting in a footnote on page 16 that Ostly’s “lack of relevant supporting evidence has become this order’s leitmotif,” adding the age discrimination claim had not a “scintilla of evidence.”
