School Board Mulls $490K Settlement with Ex-Counsel Who Reported Chief Attorney's 'Postal' Comment
A cash-strapped Florida school district is expected to consider tomorrow whether to pay $490,000 to a former senior associate general counsel who reported that his supervisor had allegedly made threatening comments about “going postal” and threatened to kill district employees, reports the Palm Beach Post.
During the soap opera that ensued, Thomas Elfers contends in a libel and invasion of privacy lawsuit, he was publicly humiliated and lost business and employment opportunities when his supervisor, chief counsel Cynthia Prettyman, said he was angry about a bad job evaluation and the district published the evaluation results.
Elfers also contends that the district retaliated against him, after he resigned on Dec. 1, 1999, by refusing to consider him for school district legal department jobs in 2001 and 2002.
Meanwhile, Prettyman’s comments were determined by an outside attorney not to have been a true threat and she eventually left the district, the article recounts.
Elfers, who is now in private practice in Miami, declined to comment for the article.
A Sun Sentinel article from 2003 provides some additional details about the Palm Beach County Circuit Court suit.
