Roy Flores seems to have a healthy sense of irony — either that or some unhealthy delusions.
The former chancellor of Pima Community College, who retired in 2012 while under investigation for sexual harassment, is now accusing the college and this newspaper of giving him unwanted attention.
That’s a twist, Dr. Flores!
To settle an employee’s EEOC complaint over alleged harassment by Flores, new PCC Chancellor Lee Lambert delivered a video and written apology Aug. 14 for Flores’ behavior. Without naming him, Lambert said in no uncertain terms that the “former chancellor” had harassed female employees at PCC.
That was enough to bring Flores creeping back, uninvited, into Tucson’s consciousness.
His lawyer wrote in an Aug. 20 letter to the college: “Dr. Flores requests that Chancellor Lambert and the Governing Board of the college issue a public apology to Dr. Flores for the reckless, incorrect statements made by Mr. Lambert in an effort to placate dissatisfied employees and former employees.”
The lawyer also sent the Star a letter helpfully explaining the way we should describe what really happened with Flores at PCC. For example, the letter says he wasn’t forced out due to the sexual harassment allegations but left voluntarily for health reasons.
Of course.
It also explains: “Dr. Flores has adamantly denied any sexual harassment on his part. The internal investigation of the college did not discover any instances of so called ‘sexual harassment’ by Dr. Flores. On behalf of Dr. Flores we request that any future articles that the Star writes pertaining to Dr. Flores accurately state that no instances of sexual harassment on the part of Dr. Flores ever were established.”
Fine — no allegations have been proved in a court. That’s true. In fact, most of the women could not sue because the statute of limitations had expired by the time they aired their complaints. But Dr. Flores, do you really want to go that route?
Don’t forget: This is a man who was paid his high salary for more than two months after he stopped working at the college in April 2012, then got his state retirement. Financially, he’s whole.
Also recall the reporting my colleague Carol Ann Alaimo did on this last year. She quoted three current or former employees, one by name and two unidentified, who described being harassed by Flores.
There was the woman who was at a conference with Flores and said he called her to his hotel room, ostensibly for business purposes, then told her to lie down on his bed.
“He said it would be our little secret,” Alaimo quoted the woman as saying.
There was also the woman who said he slipped her his cellphone number under a table and asked to get together for a late-night rendezvous. And there was the woman who said Flores would call her from his bathtub, noting that he was naked and soaping himself, and that he also called her into his office and recited romantic poetry while playing romantic music.
Those are just three women. Pima Community College received allegations against Flores from eight. It has never released the report on its investigation into the allegations, though we have asked for it. A team from the Higher Learning Commission, the accrediting agency that put Pima on probation, also interviewed eight women and found their stories of harassment credible.
So what is Lambert and the Pima Governing Board to do with Flores’ demand for an apology, or else?
I’d like to suggest they do nothing. And it sounds like that’s what Lambert is inclined to do, too.
“Till I meet with the board, it’s hard to know what the next steps will be,” Lambert told me Friday. But he added, “I don’t see any reason for me to reply (to Flores) at this point in time.”
“At this point, I stand by my public statement,” Lambert said.
Let’s say he sticks with that, and Flores decides to sue. It would be a shame in one way: Under Lambert, Pima has been moving beyond the disastrous end of the Flores era, and a lawsuit would bring it all back up.
But perhaps that could be the best thing for the public, if not necessarily for Flores.
If forced to defend itself, the college could try to show that the statements Lambert made in his apology last month are true. Then those women who complained of harassment by Flores too late to sue could be called as witnesses and have their day in court after all.
More evidence of Flores’ sense of irony.
