The city of Seattle will pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by employees who helped reveal that thousands of then-Mayor Jenny Durkan’s text messages had been deleted in 2020
SEATTLE -- The city of Seattle will pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by employees who helped reveal that thousands of then-Mayor Jenny Durkan’s text messages had been deleted in 2020 amid protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The terms of the city’s settlement with Stacy Irwin and Kimberly Ferreiro were finalized this week and released to The Seattle Times through a public disclosure request Friday, the newspaper reported.
After their whistleblower complaint in 2021, further scrutiny showed that texts of other top officials also were not retained from that period in 2020 when police used tear gas against Black Lives Matter protest crowds and temporarily vacated a police precinct during weeks of demonstrations. Protesters also temporarily occupied a small area of the city known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone.
The $2.3 million payout is in addition to nearly $800,000 spent by the city to defend the case.
Irwin and Ferreiro said they were mistreated as public-records officers in Durkan's office for objecting to how the office was handling requests by reporters and others for records, including Durkan’s texts, according to their lawsuit. They said they were “subjected to scorn, ridicule, abuse and hostility … and the demand to perform...
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