A year after a Los Angeles police officer was charged with six misdemeanors for allegedly sending sexually explicit photos and videos of his wife to LAPD colleagues and other men, the woman, also a police officer, is suing the city of the Angels.
The woman’s lawsuit, filed Wednesday, accuses the department of sexual harassment, retaliation against whistleblowers and failing to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment and retaliation. She is seeking unspecified damages.
A representative for the city attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiff’s husband, Brady Lamas, is awaiting trial on six counts of disorderly conduct by distributing a private intimate image, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court last month. December.
The complaint alleges that Lamas, 46, passed “sexually explicit photographs and videos” of his wife to other LAPD officers.
“My own husband is a predator and took advantage of me. “I would have preferred him to punch me in the face,” he wrote when requesting a restraining order against Lamas.
Her actions, she claims, led to her being sexually harassed by other officers in the department, behavior she says has continued over the past year.
Their lawsuit alleges that two officers made harassing comments and were not transferred, and that the Los Angeles Police Department did nothing to ensure that the images were no longer shared by any of the officers who had obtained them.
“The department simply did not care enough to do everything necessary to protect plaintiff,” the lawsuit states, thereby fostering a hostile work environment and harming plaintiff’s career.
Identified in the original charging document by her first name and last initial, she has worked for the LAPD for 14 years and over the course of her career has received numerous accolades and awards.
She originally found the explicit images in January 2021 when she saw a group chat on her husband’s phone in which Lamas was sharing nude photos and videos with a man she didn’t know.
The discovery, she wrote, helped explain sexually harassing comments that had been directed at her that she did not understand. At the time, her comments seemed “unusual,” but she was unaware of the images Lamas had sent via text message, WhatsApp and the Kik messaging app.
Upon discovering the images on Lamas’s phone, she felt “frozen and scared,” she wrote in the filing. The images of her had left her humiliated. Lamas was a “predator” whose actions amounted to sexual assault.
She alleged that he had surreptitiously taken photographs of her body during several visits to a doctor’s office after she underwent breast augmentation surgery. She claimed he then shared the images with other men, referring to them as “before and after photos,” according to the filing.
Some of the male LAPD employees who had received the explicit images would approach her at work, stare “at her” and make comments such as “Brady is a lucky man” and “He doesn’t know how good he is.” according to the presentation.
She reported Lamas to her supervisor, filed a report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department station in Santa Clarita and was interviewed by the Internal Affairs Division.
At the time, the LAPD issued a statement saying it was cooperating with the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office and was “concerned by the officer’s alleged off-duty conduct that does not reflect the values of the Los Angeles Police Department.” Angels.”
However, she said she was afraid to return to work and predicted the harassment would continue.
“The worst part is that this humiliation will continue to be repeated, perhaps forever, because private photographs and graphic videos are now in the hands of strangers and multiple co-workers at the LAPD,” he wrote.
The case is the latest in a series of explicit photo-sharing scandals that have rocked the department in recent years.
The city paid $1.5 million in 2020 to settle a lawsuit by a Los Angeles police detective who accused a fellow officer of hitting her and threatening to share sexually explicit images he had secretly taken if she tried to end their relationship. .
And in September, a jury awarded an LAPD captain $4 million in damages after she sued the city over a nude photo that was doctored to look like her and shared throughout the department.
