Wendy Musell 

Wendy Musell went to law school with the singular purpose of representing plaintiffs in civil rights employment cases. “I’ve been lucky enough to do that since I graduated in 1999,” she said.

Her clients in all the major cases she has handled recently are people suing the government agencies where they work or want to work. They include a deputy district attorney, an official with a California agency and all the deaf and hard-of-hearing civilians employed by the U.S. Air Force around the world.

In one of her newest cases, Musell is suing the U.S. Department of Justice and the assistant chief judge of the L.A. immigration court on behalf of the judge’s judicial assistant. Escoto v. Garland, 2:23-cv-03340 (C.D. Cal., filed May 2, 2023).

The woman “was subjected to egregious sexual harassment, including discussions about sex, about persons the judge had sex with, wanted to have sex with and persons who appeared before him who he had had sex with,” Musell said. According to the complaint, the judge repeatedly subjected her to unwanted touching, told her he could “turn her straight” and asked her to “sit on Daddy’s lap.”

When these behaviors sent her out on leave for stress, she told her supervisors why and asked for the accommodation of being transferred to a different judge. “Instead, they fired her,” Musell said.

She added that she and co-counsel Toni Jaramilla were only able to sue the judge because he is an employee of the Justice Department rather than an Article III judge. “I think this case is very important … to the justice system as a whole,” she said.

In September, she and co-counsel won an $8.5 million judgment, including costs and fees with a multiplier, on behalf of a long-time employee of the Department of Consumer Affairs who was denied an accommodation to spare her from lifting heavy loads. Bronshteyn v. State of California, 19SMCV00057 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Jan. 15, 2019).

Musell said that before trial, she made an offer to settle the case under C.C.P. Sec. 998 for $600,000. “One of the things that I have found litigating with the state … they just don’t have the same market forces that private litigants have.” The state has appealed.

She also has won some good victories against the state in two cases for clients seeking religious accommodations. Musell won $1.9 million in back pay, costs and fees with a multiplier for a woman denied a job as a prison guard because she needed Saturdays off as a Seventh-day Adventist. In a case for a Jehovah’s Witness who wouldn’t sign an unmodified loyalty oath in order to be hired by the state controller, she obtained a favorable, published decision from the 9th Circuit.

As a member of the LGBT community, Musell said, “I believe that my rights for housing and marriage and employment in part depend on the separation of church and state.”

— Don DeBenedictis