The former head of the Department for Children and Families office in Newport is fighting to get his job back after being fired for sexting an unwilling subordinate and bullying staffers, state records show.
Investigators concluded that Patrick Ryan — who oversaw 36 communities in the Northeast Kingdom as a DCF district director — sent sexual texts to a female employee with his state-issued cellphone and created a “negative, counterproductive and hostile” work environment for co-workers in the Orleans County office, according to a June dismissal letter.
“You have destroyed our confidence in your ability to provide practice and cultural leadership to the Newport District office,” wrote Christine Johnson, a DCF deputy commissioner, describing Ryan’s behavior with employees as “mistreatment, intimidation, bullying, short-temperedness, demeaning and condescending.”
Ryan appealed his firing to the Vermont Labor Relations Board in June, and his case remains ongoing. A hearing date is slated for next week.
Ryan’s attorney, Pietro Lynn of Burlington, told VTDigger that Ryan had consistently earned positive evaluations in his role and that the allegations against his client “relied on vague recollections of communications.”
“We expect that any careful consideration of the evidence will compel the conclusion that Mr. Ryan ought to be reinstated,” Lynn said.
None of the text messages were saved on either Ryan or the victim’s phone, the investigation found.
DCF Commissioner Sean Brown did not return several attempts to seek comment Thursday. In response to an email to Brown, a spokesperson for the department said officials can’t discuss personnel matters and directed questions to the Department of Human Resources.
Woman’s accusations
The investigation into Ryan opened in October 2019, after officials raised concerns about the lack of response to an employee engagement survey and Ryan’s accuser reported their interactions to a supervisor, records show. It concluded in January.
The woman who alleged misconduct against Ryan — whose name VTDigger is withholding as the subject of alleged sexual misconduct — told investigators that Ryan had started texting her in a “cordial and friendly” manner years before she was hired by the state, records show.
They had met through her work with a community group that partners with the department. She appears to have been hired by the state within the past five years.
About a year before she was hired, the woman “started getting text messages from (Ryan) that were kind of lewd,” she told investigators.
Some of the messages were about how she looked, the woman said, but they progressed into Ryan asking her how she “would like it” if romantic or sexual things happened between them. She described messages as “flirtatious” and on “the low end of lewd and lascivious,” according to investigatory documents, and as “questions of a sexualized nature.”
At the time, the organization she worked for was receiving state funds, and the woman told investigators she believed Ryan “had input” on her organization receiving state money.
While Ryan was texting the woman, he would also ask her if she was going to apply for an open position in his office, she told investigators.
The conversations continued after she was hired, the woman said. “There were times when ‘possibly’ she participated” willingly, she told investigators, but she said she tried repeatedly to get Ryan to stop the messages.
She told Ryan “a dozen times over the first two years I was here” to stop sending sexualized or flirty texts, the woman told investigators.
“This really shouldn’t be happening, you can’t be doing this because you’re the director, I’m a peon in this group,” she told Ryan, according to the account of her interview with investigators.
He continued sending the messages nonetheless, the woman said, but at some point appeared to have stopped. In the fall 2019 interview, she described the events as taking place “a couple years ago,” records show.
She told investigators she didn’t save any of the texts.
Staff alleges bullying
Employees interviewed by department investigators said there had been a hostile work environment in the Newport office for about five years, centered around Ryan’s interactions with staff.
A supervisor, who was acting director at the time of the interview, told investigators Ryan would go into people’s offices and “totally berate them,” even after he got his point across.
The supervisor described one incident when he and Ryan passed a fan that had been moved out of an office and into a hallway. The director spent two minutes lashing out at the staffer who moved the fan, the supervisor said. Ryan speaks louder and stands closer to people when they challenge him, the supervisor said. Several staffers mentioned Ryan’s reportedly intimidating stature.
Another supervisor, then a family services worker, told investigators that Ryan’s “‘language, tone and body language’ create a sense of urgency which is not necessary” and that because of Ryan’s behavior in some situations, “the proper or correct decision wasn’t made,” records show.
On one occasion, that supervisor said, Ryan told the staffer to write an affidavit to take custody of a newborn infant, despite the staffer’s belief that the child wasn’t in imminent danger.
The supervisor said Ryan “was not able to justify the necessity” of taking the child away, but Ryan thought “things are just better when DCF is in control of it.”
Ryan stood over the supervisor when giving the instruction, the employee said.
A third supervisor told investigators that she wouldn’t approach Ryan until knowing “what mood he’s in.” She said a handful of people were in Ryan’s “target zone,” and that he would yell at and demean people.
She said Ryan targeted people who challenged him, including herself and the woman who accused Ryan of sending unwanted texts.
The relationship between Ryan and the accuser was “very odd,” that supervisor said. At first, the two would joke with each other.
“And then it would turn sour pretty quick where he would talk down to her, be demeaning to her and then she would yell at him back and they would just go at it,” the supervisor told investigators, records show.
The accuser said in her interview with investigators that she couldn’t recall if Ryan had retaliated against her after she asked him to stop texting her. But she described similar hostile interactions and observations as other staffers, and estimated she would spend 5% of her work week dealing with Ryan’s outbursts. She said she had been reduced to tears multiple times a week because of the incidents, according to the state documents.
Of the seven employees interviewed by investigators, only two said they had few issues with Ryan or hadn’t seen him bully co-workers, records show.
But the supervisor who became acting director told investigators that people in the office “see similarities in Ryan’s behavior with a domestic violence scenario because of the explosive behavior, the apology and ultimately the repeated behavior,” investigators wrote in their report.
Ryan’s defense
In his November 2019 interview with state investigators, Ryan described his treatment of subordinates as respectful, appropriate and kind.
Ryan, who lives in Newport, said the relationship with his accuser had been “jokey” in the beginning before it became “flirty” prior to her hiring.
He said he wouldn’t categorize the texts as sexual in nature, but when questioned further, he said he couldn’t recall if they had been sexual, according to investigators.
He said the text chats continued “a little bit” after the woman was hired in his office, “but then we stopped,” he told investigators.
Ryan said the two had a conversation about boundaries and agreed they couldn’t talk in the way they had. He told investigators that the woman wanted to move forward in her career without being perceived as favored because of her relationship with him. He believed that conversation took place within the woman’s first year on the job, according to documents.
Ryan said he didn’t believe he had sent her any flirtatious messages within the last year.
Ryan repeatedly told investigators he couldn’t say whether all the texts to his subordinate were appropriate because he didn’t know what “appropriate” meant, according to the state’s report.
He also acknowledged that he had been on the woman’s hiring committee and had not disclosed his interactions with her, investigators wrote.
He denied accusations that he bullied or belittled staff, records show. “I don’t yell, I don’t scream, I don’t call my workers names or demean them,” he told investigators. “I’m sometimes firm with people.”
Ryan said he had improved in his interactions with staff over the past few years, records show, and said he avoids hovering over people because of his physical stature.
Like his accuser, Ryan also did not have copies of the text messages. He had recently been issued a new state cellphone, and the records on his previous device had been wiped, he said.
A week after Ryan’s dismissal date, he filed a grievance with the state labor board appealing his termination, records show.
Lynn, his attorney, argued in court documents that the state had violated state policies and fired Ryan without just cause.
The attorney wrote that the state had violated its policy of progressive discipline — increasingly severe punishment — by firing Ryan immediately, and that officials had no basis for bypassing that policy. The state failed to consider alternatives to firing Ryan, too, the attorney wrote.
Lynn also wrote that the state “did not interview all relevant witnesses, failed to consider mitigating evidence it discovered during the investigation, and failed to make appropriate factual findings,” records show.
Ryan is seeking reinstatement, back pay and lost wages and compensatory damages, according to the complaint. In the time since Ryan’s dismissal, a new district director has been hired.
“I don’t believe that the evidence they rely on will stand up to scrutiny in an evidentiary hearing,” Lynn told VTDigger. “There were no text messages that were available for the state to review.”
He said he hopes a hearing on the case will be scheduled soon and that a hearing will show Ryan “did not do anything wrong.”
In July court documents, state attorneys denied that the state lacked just cause to fire Ryan and that the investigation had been flawed. Officials violated no rules or laws when they fired Ryan, state attorneys wrote, and the grievance should be dismissed.
