Date: December 2, 2016
The Bellmore Herald (Long Island, NY) interviewed TELG client Chris Sourgoutsis about her termination from the U.S. Capitol Police after she complained of being discriminated against. The Herald also talked with TELG principal Tom Harrington, who represents Ms. Sourgoutsis in her federal lawsuit against the Capitol Police.
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Bellmorite sues Capitol Police for sex discrimination
Chris Sourgoutsis said she threw “all her chips in” when she left New York to join the U.S. Capitol police, which protects Congress. Today, however, she is back living with her parents in Bellmore and working at her family’s restaurant while she prepares a discrimination case against the force that she said she gave all of herself to join.
In papers filed in U.S. District Court in June, Sourgoutsis, 32, claimed that a pattern of belittling began during her training in Georgia to become a Capitol officer. Soon she was receiving written disciplinary complaints for what she called minor infractions that male trainees would routinely get away with.
“Honestly, I’m somebody who believes in following my gut, so I felt the harassment and the discrimination from the beginning,” she said in an interview last week with the Herald. “But being a child of immigrant parents who taught me to just keep moving forward, I tried to just brush it under the rug.”
Among the infractions for which Sourgoutsis was written up were: being in improper uniform, talking on a cell phone during lunch and, on one occasion, sitting down briefly on a low stone wall during a double shift watching the Capitol Visitors Center.
