The ousted executive director of the Civilian Complaint Review Board charged Monday that the watchdog agency failed to police one of its own — a board member who routinely sexually harassed female colleagues.
Tracy Catapano Fox filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accusing Bishop Mitchell Taylor — already under investigation for swinging a pickax during a labor dispute — of telling a female CCRB employee, “You’re the hot stuff, baby.”
In May 2014, the Queens pastor also sent a “sexually inappropriate” e-mail to another employee, remarking about a citizen’s complaint, “This is not a strip search case. This is a d–k case,” Fox charged.
Two months earlier, Fox said, she told another woman that the employee would be attending a conference with Taylor.
“The female employee became very upset and stated she was not comfortable going to the conference with Bishop Taylor because he had previously sexually harassed her,” according to the suit.
The employee reported her fears to an unnamed superior, who replied, “What, you’ve never been hit on before?” the suit charged.
Taylor was “rumored to have engaged in an affair” with another CCRB employee, the suit added.
The suit names the city, Taylor and current board chair Richard Emery as defendants.
It also accuses Emery of fudging statistics on the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policies to protect the department.
Fox said Emery retaliated against her after she complained to him and City Hall.
A day after his July 17 appointment, Emery told her he wanted to keep her on but said that “the Mayor [de Blasio’s] office wanted to ‘get rid’ of her as soon as possible,” the suit charged.
Fox said in the suit that Emery colluded with the NYPD to “conceal important statistics regarding ‘stop and frisk’ stops” — and that he even wanted the CCRB to stop investigating stop and frisk complaints in violation of the city charter.
The board chair also refused “to challenge [the NYPD’s] failure to discipline officers who violate the civil rights of the citizens of New York City,” the suit said. She said 28 cops escaped such discipline.
On the same day that Staten Island dad Eric Garner died after being put in a police chokehold, Emery joined the CCRB — and said he wanted to put out a report on chokeholds, according to the suit.
But even though Fox told him the stats were inaccurate, he insisted on issuing a report anyway, according to the suit.
Fox said she was told that she would be fired by 5 p.m. Monday unless she refused to resign and that de Blasio’s office “offered [her] her choice of jobs if she would agree to leave the CCRB.”
The 22-page suit — filed by lawyers Douglas Wigdor and Michael Willemin — claimed that Fox suffered “monetary harm, loss of income, mental anguish [and] emotional distress” and that she was left “stressed, embarrassed and anxious” by the higher-ups’ rogue antics.
She is seeking her job back and unspecified monetary damages.
Taylor was already in hot water after he was caught on camera wielding a pickax during an Aug. 8 labor dispute in which he allegedly threatened to kill the owner of a construction firm that is building a Howard Johnson hotel in Long Island City, sources said.
Surveillance video showed Taylor shoving a construction worker against a plate-glass window in the building’s lobby, then grabbing and swinging a pickax during a melee outside.
Cops and prosecutors are probing allegations that Taylor has tried to extort jobs and cash from the hotel project, sources said.
Taylor, leader of the non-denominational Center of Hope International church, was chosen for the 13-member CCRB by the City Council in 2008.
He later apologized for the pickax incident.
Neither Taylor nor Emery could be immediately reached.
