The former girlfriend and highly paid assistant of Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr. is demanding up to $65 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the city of failing to stop the mayor from sexually harassing and retaliating against her after she ended their nearly decade-long affair.
The demand letter, sent as Inglewood is once again in the spotlight with the opening of the Intuit Dome, calculates the damages to Melanie McDade-Dickens, the former executive assistant to the mayor, at $65,204,659, but states she is willing to accept the maximum amount allowed by the city’s insurance policy — believed to be about $35 million — to drop the case against the city, Butts, former City Manager Artie Fields and Assistant City Manager Jose Cortes.
In the letter, David Miller, an attorney at the firm Martin & Martin LLP, states it is a one-time offer and must be accepted within 30 days.
“If we are not able to reach an amicable informal resolution, we are prepared to litigate this matter,” Miller wrote. “Based on the facts set forth herein, it is our expectation that the ultimate verdict of a jury will exceed policy limits and will be widely publicized.”
The case is set for a jury trial on Oct. 28. But before then, it must survive a motion, scheduled to be heard Aug. 23, that asks the judge to throw out the case on the grounds that McDade-Dickens and her attorneys allegedly have stalled the litigation for more than a year by “engaging in a staggering pattern of discovery abuses.”
Mira Hashmall, an attorney representing Inglewood, said McDade-Dickens was previously sanctioned for failing to comply with discovery requests and is now accused of violating additional court orders and destroying documents that support the city’s reasoning for firing her in 2019.
If the motion is successful, not only will the case end before going to trial, but McDade-Dickens could be hit with $217,404 in sanctions.
McDade-Dickens’ attorneys, who took over the case in 2022, have opposed the motion, denying there was any obstruction and stating they have provided all of the legally required documents. They have asked for counter-sanctions of $101,600 against the city.
Assistant fired in 2019
Inglewood fired McDade-Dickens at the end of 2019. She sued a little more than a year later.
She alleges the termination was in retaliation for breaking up with the mayor, who she had been secretly dating since working on his initial campaign for mayor in 2010, and for refusing his subsequent advances. The city, however, maintains she was fired for cause, alleging she used city employees for personal matters, falsified payroll records and submitted fraudulent documents to obtain a home loan.
“In advance of the hearing, Ms. McDade failed to dispute the mountain of evidence showing her discovery violations, spoliation of evidence, and perjury, and instead released misleading text messages to prop up her baseless claims,” Hashmall said in a statement. “Ms. McDade’s attorneys have publicly announced an outlandish settlement demand. It’s like announcing you’re going to win the Super Bowl when you’re a last place high school team. This is a desperate ploy for publicity.”
McDade-Dickens has accused Butts of cutting her assignments, berating her in front of staff, and harassing and stalking her following their breakup. Other city employees named in the case allegedly either knew, or should have known, about the inappropriate relationship and the harassment, and did nothing to stop it, according to the lawsuit.
In 2021, one of the claims related to sexual harassment was thrown out by a judge because the case was filed late. However, proving sexual harassment is still important to the overall litigation, as it would support other claims alleging retaliation, the city’s failure to investigate and prevent sexual harassment, negligent supervision and harassment.
Mayor’s words ‘will be his undoing’
“Our client endured the worst the Mayor could throw at her and the city was his enabler,” lead attorney Ernest Martin Jr. said in a statement. “She has stood strong in the face of unyielding efforts — first to harass and control her, later to undermine her and diminish her character.
“For years, many people in power and in the media dismissed her story. But she refused to give in, and, ultimately, it is Butts’ own words that will be his undoing, as they prove irrefutably that she has been telling the truth all along.”
The demand letter states the firm upped its dollar figure upon reviewing “text and email communications between Ms. McDade and Butts” that it alleges show “without the slightest doubt” that McDade’s employment was conditioned upon submission to unwelcome sexual advances.
“Almost immediately after Ms. McDade began having sex with Butts, he hired her as his Senior Assistant to the Mayor at a pay rate of $80,000 per year for part time work,” the letter states. “As early communications indicate, Ms. McDade expressed great reluctance to begin working for the City while also being Butts’ lover. Butts assured her, however, that she would still have her job if they broke up because he said she earned the position.”
Butts allegedly gave her “more and more assignments and increased her responsibilities at the City,” with her salary and benefits reaching nearly $500,000 in 2019, according to the letter.
Her attorneys acknowledge her pay was “very large for a public employee” and that “there does not appear to be any oversight at the City that would call her pay into question.” Their calculation estimates she has lost $10.2 million in past and future wages and allege her compensation, if it continued to grow at the same rate, would have reached $881,929 by 2034. The rest of the $65 million covers punitive damages, emotional distress and attorneys’ fees.
Texts reveal nasty breakup
Text messages and emails released along with the demand letter detail a nasty breakup, with Butts repeatedly accusing McDade-Dickens of cheating and McDade-Dickens accusing Butts of being controlling.
The messages are excerpts, starting and stopping in the middle of conversations and lacking context. The communications, however, include sexual language, verbal insults from both sides and insinuations about the legitimacy of McDade-Dickens’ career. Several showed there was seemingly little barrier between McDade-Dickens and Butts’ personal and professional lives.
“I made your life, you are so ungrateful,” Butts allegedly wrote in July 2018, a few months after the breakup.
In other messages, Butts stated he brought McDade-Dickens into a “career at a payscale few in public service ever reach” and that he built her “from a shattered, battered woman into an executive.” Butts said he completed parts of McDade-Dickens’ college coursework for her and accused her of using the career and salary he gave her to the benefit of a new romantic partner.
“I worked for you so that you could qualify to be where you are,” he wrote.
Work-relationship lines blur
In another chain, stretching from 9 a.m. to midnight on Mother’s Day in 2018, Butts expressed his desire to reconcile and became frustrated when McDade-Dickens did not respond, accusing her of spending time with another man. Butts asked her to call him for work-related matters amid the fight over their ended relationship, saying she did not have the day off because she is a salaried employee and is required to take his calls at any hour.
At nearly 11:30 p.m., he wrote “no mayoral assistant would deliberately ignore a boss’s call and maintain employment,” according to the excerpt.
“If you want to ignore personal texts, that’s fine, work phone calls are business,” he wrote. “You won’t know until you answer if a call is for work.”
Months later, during another fight, Butts told McDade-Dickens he would no longer contact her unless necessary for her job and established that then-City Manager Fields would approve any projects she worked on. Additional text messages in May and June 2019, just months before McDade-Dickens’ firing, show the former couple was once again arguing over betrayals.
Why McDade-Dickens was fired
The city placed McDade-Dickens on leave in July 2019 and accused her of committing fraud by forging a bonus check to make herself seem more financially stable for a home loan and asking an employee to co-sign it. Text messages released earlier this year by the defense team seemed to support some of city’s allegations.
In a series of text messages, McDade-Dickens sent a picture of what appeared to be a pay stub for $21,000 with white-out over the date and new numbers written-in. She then told an employee to scan it, send it to a real estate agent and then delete the image from her phone.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she wrote.
McDade-Dickens’ attorneys have denied that she broke any laws and have accused the outside law firm who investigated the matter of being biased, as it had previously donated to Butts’ political campaigns.
“The investigation resulted in accusations of wrongdoing, most of which were unsubstantiated and others that were insignificant in comparison to the severe acts of misconduct by others that the City had previously brushed off,” Miller wrote in the demand letter. “For Ms. McDade, however, who was no longer sleeping with the Mayor, these slight policy violations were sufficient to end her position with the city.”
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