A high-ranking California emergency services official has been accused in a lawsuit of impeding wildfire recovery efforts as part of a retaliation campaign against a subordinate who had rejected his sexual advances.
Kendra Bowyer, whose job was to coordinate wildfire debris removal for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, made the allegations against Cal OES Deputy Director of Recovery Operations Ryan Buras as part of a broader lawsuit by sexual harassment and workplace discrimination filed Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court. .
Buras did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Cal OES said it does not comment on “personnel matters and active litigation.”
The lawsuit accuses Buras, appointed in 2019 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, of harassing Bowyer for two years. The lawsuit describes a night in 2020 when Bowyer slept at Buras's apartment after a work dinner; He claims he climbed onto the bed where she was sleeping and touched her without her consent.
The lawsuit alleges that Buras cut off all communication with Bowyer after she told him his sexual advances were unprofessional and needed to stop, making it impossible to do his job helping local jurisdictions devastated by wildfires.
“Buras' retaliation prevented Ms. Bowyer from providing essential services to disaster survivors, putting their health and safety at risk,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit details a May 2021 meeting in which Buras allegedly told Santa Cruz County officials that they were ineligible to receive federal funds for the removal of wildfire-damaged trees because Bowyer did not submit proper documentation in his name. That statement was false, the complaint alleges, and “a whole setup to make [Bowyer] seem incompetent.”
Santa Cruz County officials did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Cal OES and the state of California are also defendants in Bowyer's lawsuit, which alleges that agency officials knew Buras harassed women but kept him in the workplace and targeted his accusers for enforcement action. disciplinary or dismissal.
The lawsuit cites interviews about harassment Bowyer said she gave to a medical provider and a Cal OES attorney after taking medical leave as a result of stress, anxiety and depression caused by Buras' actions. It also cites a separate lawsuit, filed in 2020 by former Cal OES state manager Steven Larson, that claimed Larson was unlawfully fired as punishment for filing internal complaints about Buras for allegedly “creating a hostile work environment for women.”
Larson claimed that several women at the agency had complained to him about Buras and that he was forced to leave the agency for communicating those complaints to agency leaders.
Bowyer and Larson have the same attorneys, and their complaint includes emails in which Cal OES officials discuss their former colleague's allegations. In an exchange referencing Larson, according to the complaint, Buras wrote to Cal OES Director Nancy Ward, “I'm tired, Nancy,” and Ward responded, “Just hang in there! “This is all just noise!!!”
“Cal OES' actions are egregious and demonstrate that it does not care about apprehending a sexual predator and will take steps to cover up his illegal activity, including firing employees, making false accusations against those employees, and expelling victims,” Bowyer's lawsuit alleges.
Cal OES has denied Larson's claims in court, saying her separation from the agency had nothing to do with her persistent complaints about Buras. According to Bowyer's complaint, Cal OES alleged that Larson violated an anti-nepotism policy with a Cal OES contractor.
The agency declined to comment Tuesday on Bowyer's claims, but said in a statement that “sexual harassment in the workplace is an affront to our values as an organization” and “will not be tolerated in any form.”
“Nothing is more important than the safety and well-being of staff and the communities they serve. More simply put, every Cal OES employee and contractor must have a safe and respectful work environment,” the agency said.
In an interview with The Times, Bowyer, 36, said he had long worried that Buras would ruin his career in the emergency services field — and change his life — if he rejected him outright. She said he constantly told her about people who had crossed paths with him and were on a “dead to me” or “DTM” list he maintained. She said that because Cal OES paid his salary and covered his housing, car and food expenses while he moved between disaster areas, she tried to put up with his unwanted advances.
Bowyer said he decided to say something after two incidents in late 2020.
In September of that year, according to his lawsuit, Buras invited Bowyer and another colleague to his apartment in Sacramento so they could share dinner and discuss disaster assignments in the field. Bowyer said Buras insisted she spend the night, even though he had booked a hotel, and told her to sleep in his bed while he slept in another living room with another male colleague of his.
At some point that night, she woke up to find Buras next to her in bed, according to the complaint.
“The entire front of his body wrapped around the back of [her] body, and his left arm wrapped and resting on [her] arm,” the complaint says.
Bowyer “was instantly terrified” and “thought this was the moment he would instantly lose his job,” the complaint says. She said he backed away and got out of bed after she asked him what he was doing.
Two months later, in November 2020, Bowyer's mother visited her in California. When Buras learned of her visit, according to her lawsuit, she insisted on preparing the women a dinner featuring traditional dishes from her shared home state of Louisiana. The complaint says Bowyer felt “forced to deal with” Buras and “too embarrassed and afraid to tell her mother” about her concerns, so she accepted the dinner.
The complaint alleges that Buras, who was married at the time to a former state official, was unprofessional throughout that day, talking about taking Bowyer on a “surprise Christmas trip” and at one point holding her hand in front of her mother. .
In an interview with The Times, Bowyer's mother, Maureen Bowyer, said she found the visit disturbing. She said Buras was constantly “hovering” around her daughter, which clearly made her feel uncomfortable. At one point before dinner, while her daughter was out of the room, Buras “started talking to me about the state of his marriage and about his wife's desire to get a divorce and all that other stuff,” she said.
When Maureen Bowyer saw Buras take her daughter's hand, “I got furious,” she said, “and I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I just walked up and cut them off, like, 'What the hell?' “
Bowyer's complaint says she texted Buras shortly afterward to tell him “the relationship was unprofessional and should end.” The court filing includes an image of text messages Buras allegedly sent in response, in which he said he would “always be ashamed of myself” and that he probably looked at his mother “like a typical cheating, no-good jerk.” .
After taking a medical leave, Bowyer said she could not return to Cal OES and left for good in December 2021 and moved in with her mother. She said that at first she just wanted to “get away” from everything that had happened, grieve the career she had lost and move on with her life.
However, Bowyer said, she recently spoke with a former colleague who told her that there were other women at Cal OES who “couldn't afford to stand up for themselves and go away and do what was best for them because their family depended on that job.” .”
That made her want to file the lawsuit, to “put an end to” Buras and “the administration that knows what it's doing and just sweeps it under the rug,” she said.
Bowyer's lawsuit seeks compensation for lost wages, medical costs, attorney fees and other damages, along with a Cal OES investigation into Buras and the firing of officials who allowed his alleged abuse to persist.
