IAFF and Kelly Sued

Eric Lamar
4 min readSep 30, 2024

--

Legal brief or soap opera script?

Del Re

Elizabeth Del Re, a former IAFF employee, is suing the union and Edward Kelly alleging gender discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation for protected activity.

Del Re was a former assistant to the president there and was let go in 2022.

She’s gunning for Kelly, painting him as a Bean town Archie Bunker in firefighter garb.

Her filing says she was employed by the IAFF from 2004 to 2022 but also states she was Assistant Administrator of the Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency from March 2010 until November 2012.

Surely one cannot work for the Feds and the IAFF simultaneously. Is she claiming IAFF employment incorrectly?

She refers to Kelly’s election to president in 2021 as “nasty” (it wasn’t particularly, at least by IAFF standards) and then says, “Kelly, who styles himself a “tough guy” Boston Firefighter, had a well-known animus toward women in leadership positions — positions that he had consistently sought to fill with his white male Boston-based cronies.”

Let’s pause at “styles himself a “tough guy” Boston Firefighter.”

By using the word “styles” she is accusing Kelly of being a fake or a poser and by putting quotation marks around tough guy she drives the point home. It’s a pointless attack which will have to be defended.

She goes on to refer to “Kelly and his posse” and says:

Since he was elected to leadership of the IAFF, Kelly managed to rid the IAFF of more than a dozen women, including ten at the executive level. In certain instances, he would terminate them outright, but more commonly he would attempt to bully them into quitting by depriving them of their decision-making authority, diminishing and marginalizing their roles, cutting their staff and funding, and harassing, threatening and ridiculing them until they agreed to leave.

If a key requirement of a brief is to survive a summary motion to dismiss, here is where several specific examples would be given to show the judge there were meat on these bones. None are given.

“Posse”, by the way, is a “group of men summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law” so the use of it in the brief is either unintended or a blunder. Perhaps “gang” would have suited her purposes better.

Next comes “Plaintiff was told by a female colleague who was recently
terminated that she heard that Plaintiff was “next.”

If hearsay is “the report of another person’s words by a witness,” is this not perilously close to it?

She continues,

To make her situation all the more intolerable, Plaintiff and her female co-
workers were forced to endure rampant sexism and physical and verbal abuse in the workplace.

By way of example, during this period it was commonplace for male IAFF employees to use sexually charged language toward women and physically grab female staff members with no consequences (and no apparent fear of any consequences). On more than one occasion, this misconduct was carried out in full view of IAFF leadership.

Her example is not one. An example would be one or more specific instances where the time, place and parties could be clearly identified.

After being terminated Del Re states, “Fearing that Plaintiff may be willing to blow the whistle on Kelly and his cohorts, Plaintiff received a call from the IAFF’s General Counsel later in the day offering her better
terms.”

It’s a fair question to ask how she knows fear was a motivator?

A summing up of sorts includes,

After Plaintiff was terminated, her phone rang off the hook from friends,
subordinates, colleagues, and others. Many tears were shed. Also calling were the women that had involuntarily left before Plaintiff to share their support and their own mistreatment. Some indicated that they retired out of fear they would be terminated. Others simply could not take the abuse anymore and quit. Others were still employed there and feared that they would not make it to retirement — so they were staying quiet. These women shared stories of abuse, sexism, physical violence, yelling and assault over their time at the IAFF.

I cringed at “many tears were shed” — in a legal brief? There are no doubt prospective D.C jurors who would find this tugging of heartstrings as both insulting and potentially manipulative.

And all those stories? So give us a couple.

A legal brief is a place to lay out cold hard facts in order to convince a judge that your assertions have merit and that the grievances are both real and supported by evidence.

Kelly’s leadership behavior at the IAFF has been appalling and the Boston fire department is no beacon of inclusion but this brief is some pretty thin gruel.

Even a mediator would likely roll their eyes.

Boston Globe

A final note: if you are working in an environment where you are being mistreated you should be documenting the improper behavior in an exacting fashion and making your supervisors aware of your concerns. The “go along/get along” strategy rarely works because, at the very least, your soul and spirit will be crushed in the process.

--

--