The former county manager of Henry County was being investigated for alleged sexual harassment shortly before he resigned on May 10, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A female employee with the county accused Jim Walker of removing her cell phone from the back pocket of her pants and making suggestive remarks to her about her appearance on several occasions. Those were just some of the allegations mentioned in the 25-page report the county human resources department submitted to the board of commissioners last week. Walker denied the allegations. Henry County HR officials interviewed the woman and Walker as well as a half-dozen witnesses.
“We just laid out the facts. We did not make any recommendations,” HR director Nedra Swift, told the AJC. Although no recommendations were made, Swift said “Obviously, we need to have sexual harassment training. We’re assessing what’s been done and what needs to be done.”
Efforts to reach Walker on Monday were unsuccessful.
The report caps the end of what was for Walker a controversial 13-month tenure with the county. Walker spent most of the last year locked in a battle over who would effectively run the county of 210,000, including overseeing its $127.4 million budget: the county manager or the chairman of the board of commissioners.
State lawmakers recently settled the dispute. On March 27, Gov. Deal signed into law a bill that gave the authority to the county manager.
A month later, sexual harassment allegations against Walker began emerging.
On April 23, the woman, whose name was redacted from the documents, alleges Walker touched her “left breast with reading glasses while pointing out a spot of spilled tea” on her blouse, the report said. The incident made the woman “feel weird, shocked and uncomfortable,”according to the report. The two were alone in a hallway outside of the budget director’s office when the alleged incident occurred.
Then four days later, the woman was leaving Walker’s office when Walker allegedly grabbed her cell phone from her left back pocket. He told her he did it to keep the phone from falling out. She said the phone was deep in her pocket and couldn’t have fallen out. The woman, a new hire, says she didn’t say anything at the time for fear of losing her job. An employee who saw the incident gave her a copy of the employee handbook after he saw she was visibly upset by the incident.
Walker disputed the April 27 claim, saying an injury he sustained in the military would have prevented him from reaching deep into her pocket. He provided HR investigators with copies of his medical records and documents from the Veterans Administration about his injuries.
“The limited range of motion I’ve had in my right thumb and palm since 1982 render me unable to perform any of the…movements without considerable effort, and possible assistance from my other hand. It would not be reasonable to expect me to attempt a physical motion I’ve been unable to perform for over 30 years, ” the report quotes Walker as saying.
In addition to those two incidents, the report said the woman accused Walker of “miscellaneous comments over a period of time that were offered about (her) makeup, hair, suntan and clothing.” The comments made the woman uneasy in Walker’s presence, the report noted. The woman referred to one incident in which Walker said she should wear a “night gown” to an Employee Appreciation event and that he wanted her to be his Vanna White — the star from the Wheel of Fortune game show — when county employees squared off in their own version of the game show Family Feud. Walker dismissed the nightgown claim as a “typical guy mistake” saying he meant to say evening gown, the report said.
Investigators noted in their report that they “witnessed an inexcusable amount of intimidation of witnesses participating in the investigation from an individual whose key focal areas are leadership, ethics and values.”
Walker, 55, was on paid administrative leave just before he resigned. Assistant county manager Cheri Hobson-Matthews was named interim county manager last week.
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