By Erica C. Barnett
An investigation into complaints against the director of Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights (SOCR), Derrick Wheeler-Smith, found that Wheeler-Smith sexually harassed a male employee by accompanying him to a strip club during a city-sponsored trip to historic civil rights sites in Alabama in 2023.
PubliCola reported on the investigation’s general conclusions in June; two weeks later, we reported on allegations about the strip-club outing. The full investigation report, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, ties those two stories together, confirming that the sexual-harassment finding was related to the strip-club outing.
It also provides additional details about some of the other allegations that the investigators did not believe rose to the level of harassment, including misogynistic and transpobic memes Wheeler-Smith and the employee shared over texts.
The investigation was prompted by a memo from PROTEC17, the union that represents many SOCR employees, containing allegations that Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, had engaged in discrimination, harassment, and intimidation against civil rights office staff.
“The investigation included a review of OCR employees’ allegations that Wheeler-Smith and/or Mohamed engaged in unwelcome conduct or comments based on religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity” the investigation report says. “However, even assuming all the information provided during the investigation was true, those allegations did not rise to the level of conduct protected by” the city’s rule against discrimination and workplace harassment.
The investigation, which wrapped up in June, found that Wheeler-Smith sexually harassed his male employee, who was also a longtime personal friend, “by taking [the employee] to a strip club on a work trip.” The employee told investigators he didn’t feel he could say no to going to the strip club, given that Wheeler-Smith was his boss. Wheeler-Smith said he only went to the strip club because the employee said he wouldn’t go without him.
Investigators found that the misogynistic texts did not constitute sexual harassment because they were not “unwanted,” and that a change in the employee’s work assignment wasn’t retaliation for comments the employee made about trans women at a group training.
Nor, the investigators found, was it sexual harassment when Wheeler-Smith told a group of staffers a story about accidentally ending up a a swingers’ resort with his wife and being propositioned, or when he gave a toast at a work event that concluded, “May all your ups and downs be in bed,” which some staffers found offensive. (Wheeler-Smith told investigators that by “ups and downs in bed,” he meant getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.)
Wheeler-Smith sent one of the memes we previously reported on—a fake image of Kamala Harris with bruised knees captioned, “CONGRATS to Kamala on her new promotion! I don’t know how you did it!”—with the message, “This innanet is undefeated.” According to the report, Wheeler-Smith told investigators the message was meant to “show his distaste for the vile and disrespectful meme,” but his employee said he took the comment to mean the meme was “spot on” and “accurate as hell.”
In another message, Wheeler-Smith sent an X thread by Kanye West that concluded, “WIVES SELL PUSSY FOR LIFE,” saying Kanye was “saying some wild shit but he got a point here.”
The texts Wheeler-Smith sent the employee also included a meme of a Black woman posting, “My throat hurt but my baby got uniform clothes,” and a screenshot that read, “12 years ago today. my friend Dave came out running and screaming ‘ITS A BOY!!!’ With tears streaming down his face…We never went back to Thailand again.”
According to the investigation, Wheeler-Smith said he exchanged texts with the employee, a longtime acquaintance, out of deference to an elder. “According to Wheeler-Smith, the Black community respected its elder members,” the investigators wrote. “[The employee] was a seventy-year-old Black man. As a result, [the employee] set the tone of their friendship.”
Wheeler-Smith has been on paid administrative leave since March; Mike Chin is currently serving as the second interim director of the department.
PROTEC17, along with the chairs of of the four city commissions SOCR oversees—the LGBTQ, Human Rights, Disability, and Women’s Commissions—have called for Wheeler-Smith’s removal.
Unlike most department heads, the SOCR director is not an at-will employee. A law passed in 2017 prohibits the mayor from removing the SOCR director except for “just cause.” The provision was meant to shield the office that enforces civil rights laws from political interference and retaliation, but it also makes the prospect of firing the SOCR director challenging and legally fraught.
A spokesperson for Mayor Katie Wilson said the mayor’s office “is completing its review of the investigation report and determining next steps. We expect that process to be complete by early October and can share a fuller update on the outcomes of this process, at that time.”