If you know nothing so far about this matter, consider this: Illinois taxpayers paid $550,000 for an independent investigation that cleared a state supervisor of a sexual harassment claim by an employee named Jenny Thornley. Yet Thornley collected money on a workers’ compensation claim for physical and emotional damage based on that same sexual harassment claim – even after the investigation concluded that the harassment didn’t happen. And the agency that employed Thornley never even knew about the workers’ comp claim until after it was being paid. Instead, the office of Gov. JB Pritzker pushed it through without that agency’s knowledge, according to court filings.
Answers already were needed back in December from the administration of Gov. JB Pritzker, we wrote then, about the Thornley saga.
But no answers came and the questions have become still more serious thanks to additional allegations and evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit recently unsealed and made public. It was filed by Emily Fox, who was the program administrator and is now executive director of the State Police Merit Board, which is the agency Thornley worked for. It’s hardly the biggest scandal in Illinois history in terms of dollars, but it tells volumes about how things work in the state if it is as accurate as it appears to be.
From the complaint in that whistleblower lawsuit:
This extraordinary level of involvement by the Governor’s General Counsel in a workers’ compensation claim involving an...
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