Former DSS Worker's Federal Suit: Discrimination and Retaliation Led to Her Firing
But the termination letter of the former social worker, a gay woman, cites not bias but her sharing of confidential information about department clients.
BREVARD — A suit filed in U.S. District Court in Asheville makes serious allegations against the Transylvania County Department of Social Services.
Former social worker Marilyn Borom, a gay woman, said her firing from the department last year was the result of both bias against her sexual orientation and retaliation for reporting misconduct at the agency — actions that included intimidating and harassing employees, “falsifying official documents . . . (and) misappropriating state resources.”
But Borom’s termination letter also contains serious charges, highlighting 50 instances of her emailing or texting confidential information about families who were clients of the department — often to her domestic partner, Sarah Brown.
“This decision was based on . . . conduct constituting violations of state and federal law, willful violation of known work rules and conduct unbecoming that is detrimental to the county’s services,” the letter said.
Borom, 45, who was fired from her $54,000-per-year job in May, filed the suit Oct. 29 after exhausting all other avenues of appeal, the complaint says.
Borom, who previously had “impeccably served her community for approximately eight years” in a similar position in Henderson County, was hired in Transylvania in March of 2020, the suit says.
She quickly began noticing violations of internal policy and state law, as well as a tendency to punish employees who didn’t “toe the line,” according to the complaint.
She documented the violations and passed them on to Brown, who included them in an email sent to “appropriate authorities,” the suit says, including two former interim directors, as well as Transylvania County Commissioners and the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Borom also complained about the actions of her supervisor, according to the suit.
The department didn’t investigate Borom’s and Brown’s allegations, the suit said, but in the spring of 2021 launched an investigation into Borom for sharing this information.
It did so even through state law requires employees to report any violations they see, said the suit, which also noted that heterosexual employees who had shared information with spouses and partners had not been fired.
The termination was intended not only to silence Borom but to discourage other employees from coming forward, according to the legal complaint, which said the action “created fear of similar retaliatory and/or suppressive acts or otherwise deterred her from upholding her duty to blow the whistle.”
“One of the things that society has been strongly behind is whistle blowing,” said one of Borom’s lawyers, Stephen Lindsay, of Asheville. “It is important that people feel free to let people know when things are being done improperly.”
The suit, which seeks damages resulting from her termination, was filed in federal court because it alleges violations of not only state law but of Borom’s United States civil and constitutional rights, he said. Details of departmental misconduct are not included in the suit, and Lindsay declined to provide Brown’s email, which does include such details.
Sean Perrin, the Charlotte lawyer representing DSS, also denied a request for the email, citing the exemption to employee information in the state public records law.
Brooks Fuller, the director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, said such a complaint might be protected by federal law, but not by the language Perrin referenced.
“Complaints against the workplace do not qualify under 153a,” he wrote in an email.
The suit also does not document any overt discrimination directed against Borom, such as derogatory comments about her sexual orientation.
But filing the complaint is a starting point, Lindsay said, and details will emerge as the case continues.
“It’s kind of like the Titanic and the iceberg,” he said. “You’re sort of seeing the tip of it right now, and there’s a whole lot of stuff under the surface. That’s what litigation is about, revealing the whole iceberg.”
But the additional information might also bolster the opposing argument, he acknowledged, and noted that Perrin has not yet filed a response to the complaint.
“I would certainly encourage you to include that you’re only getting half of the story,” Lindsay said.
Current DSS Director Amanda Vanderoef — who was hired shortly before Borom’s termination and is not singled out for misconduct in the suit — referred questions about the case to Perrin because litigation is still pending.
“We’re going to vigorously defend this,” Perrin said. “There is no discrimination at all.”
Certainly, the termination does not acknowledge any bias against Borom’s sexual orientation.
It informed Borom she was fired “based on your grossly inefficient job performance resulting in the creation of the potential of serious harm to a client.”
The letter said Borom’s misconduct was so serious that “no reasonable person should expect to receive prior warning.” But it also noted that Borom had previously been disciplined, in December of 2020, for “unacceptable personal conduct.”
Much of the six-page letter is devoted to documenting to Borom’s sharing of confidential information about 15 different families. Borom began sending these texts and emails weeks after she was hired and continued to do so for nearly a year, according to the letter.
She knew the sensitive nature of the information she shared, writing in one email to Brown, “ ‘keep in mind that actual case details are confidential,’ ” the letter said.
And in a meeting held to discuss these allegations, Borom did not produce evidence countering them, the letter said.
DSS employees are covered by the state personnel code, and the department is advised by a board that also hires its directors, according to the department’s website.
“It’s a very strange hybrid,” said board member and former County Commissioner Page Lemel. “Here you have this independent governing board, but the actions that it takes have potential liability for the county.”
Transylvania DSS’ history of disputes with employees include a 2017 court ruling requiring it to reinstate a supervisor it had fired for trying to influence a judge’s decision in a case involving her daughter’s boyfriend.
In 2019, an administrative judge upheld the termination of another employee for sharing inappropriate personal information with coworkers.
Much of Borom’s time at the department fell into a transitional period after the departure of previous director, Darrell Renfroe, in August of 2020. The interim directors named in the suit were employees of a consulting company hired to temporarily lead the department and the effort to hire a new director, Lemel said.
“We as a board really wanted to take our time and be very intentional in recommitting the operation of Transylvania County Department of Social Services to being the best it could be,” Lemel said.
She said the challenges of running DSS include providing a “huge spectrum” of services, from child protection to adult guardianship. The county department faces stiff competition for the limited number of employees that meet the qualifications required by the state — an obstacle compounded by the shortage of workforce housing in Transylvania, said Board Chair Jamie Gilmore.
“For Transylvania County to recruit and maintain quality employees, they have to be able to afford to live here, otherwise it’s a hard draw,” she said.
But both Gilmore and Lemel said they are confident in their choice of Vanderoef.
“She’s the right person at the right time for Transylvania County,” Lemel said. “She has really been engaged in employee issues and workplace culture.”