An attorney hired by former Portland Mayor Sam Adams conducted an investigation into allegations that Adams sexually harassed a staffer while in office, then the lawyer paid two legal experts to weigh in because he said it was the only way to get an independent review.

The experts, a retired Oregon judge and an employment lawyer, attested there was insufficient evidence to legally support the harassment claims.

Attorney Michael Fuller released a report Monday with the experts’ opinions and a summary of the redacted information he submitted to them. He acknowledged that the report may not assure the public that Adams didn’t sexually harass the aide while he was mayor.

“I get it. I get why people would be suspicious of a report by an attorney hired by the accused that found no wrongdoing,” Fuller said. “But with the statute of limitations up and no court that can determine the veracity of these allegations, I think I did the only thing that could be done to determine what the truth was.”

[Read the report]

Adams, a long-time aide to the late Mayor Vera Katz and a former Portland city commissioner, was the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city when he was elected to the post in 2008 on the strength of his city government experience and coalition building skills. But the month he began his sole term as the Portland’s top elected official, Adams admitted to lying about a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old he met while serving as city commissioner.

Fuller said he paid former Lane County Circuit Judge Lyle Velure, who retired in 2007, and Portland-based employment law attorney Rebecca Cambreleng “their hourly rates” to view redacted copies of evidence his firm gathered. He asked them each to determine if the case would have warranted legal action had the statute of limitations not run out.

The allegations were made by Cevero Gonzalez, a former executive assistant who worked for Adams from 2008 to 2013.

Gonzalez declined comment when reached by The Oregonian/OregonLive, but said the report was “Mr. Adams’ and Mr. Fuller’s opinion.”

Fuller, a consumer protection attorney, said he redacted the names of the people and locations involved and didn’t tell Velure and Cambreleng who he represented. He said his firm collected nearly a thousand pages of documents that included Gonzalez’s published letter to city officials detailing the allegations, news articles and other materials, including emails, gathered through public records searches.

Gonzalez wasn’t contacted as part of the investigation. Neither he nor Adams were interviewed as part of the review, a step Fuller said he took to “eliminate the issue of credibility.” Former city mayoral office staff members were interviewed or gave statements.

The attorney said in lieu of speaking with Gonzalez, he relied on an October 2019 story published by Willamette Week about Adams in which Gonzalez said he didn’t have any documentation of the alleged harassment and wouldn’t provide the outlet with the names of anyone he confided in.

Fuller declined to publicly release any evidence he obtained in the case, saying he hadn’t gotten permission from everyone involved beforehand.

The report was released Monday as rumors swirled that Adams was considering running for Portland City Council. He announced Wednesday that he intends to challenge Commissioner Chloe Eudaly in the May primary.

Adams hired Fuller and his firm in October. Fuller, who specializes in representing people who claim they have been victimized, said this was the first time he represented someone accused of sexual harassment.

Gonzalez sent a six-page letter to city officials in Nov. 2017 with accusations that Adams sexually harassed him, including demanding he set up sexual encounters for him, questioning Gonzalez about his sex life and detailing his own sexual experiences and exposing his genitals to Gonzalez.

Gonzalez said one instance of harassment occurred with Adams when he picked the mayor up from a trip to China. Gonzalez said he also was assigned to prepare a briefing book for that trip that he said Adams insisted include information about where to find the best gay bars and bathhouses. Both the retired judge and the employment attorney said the evidence Fuller compiled showed staffers other than Gonzalez prepared the China briefing book and drove Adams home from the trip.

Gonzalez’s letter also detailed allegations of other mistreatment by Adams such as being required to clean Adams’ house and do his laundry on the city taxpayers’ dime.

At the time Gonzalez went public, his letter was published by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Willamette Week and other local outlets and Gonzalez also publicly spoke about it at the time. He said he went along with whatever was asked of him because he feared retaliation and losing his job but was later encouraged by the #MeToo movement to provide an account to city officials.

Adams has maintained that he never sexually harassed Gonzalez. Tom Miller, Adams’ chief of staff at the time, denied Gonzalez’s account to The Oregonian/OregonLive that Gonzalez reported inappropriate behavior by Adams to him.

The statute of limitations on the sexual harassment allegations had expired by the time Gonzalez’s letter was sent and the city attorney’s office declined to investigate the claims.

In the earlier case against Adams, in which teen Beau Breedlove accused Adams of illegally luring him into a sexual relationship when he was 17, the then-mayor also was not prosecuted. Breedlove was deemed by prosecutors to have little credibility and a lack of evidence when it came to that claim.

For months, Adams vehemently denied ever having sex with the teen, who was more than 20 years younger than him. But he was eventually forced to acknowledge their relationship was sexual after the teen turned 18. He called that “inappropriate.”

An ‘independent’ review

Velure, the former judge who now has a commercial mediation practice, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

He said in his opinion letter about the allegations that he reviewed the materials he was given by Fuller as if he were reviewing evidence as a judge in a court bench trial. He said he believed “no actionable sexual harassment existed.”

“Having carefully reviewed the evidence in a light most favorable to the accuser, my legal opinion is that the evidence is insufficient to support a legal claim under state or federal workplace sexual harassment laws,” Velure wrote.

Cambreleng said in her opinion letter that she likely would have taken Gonzalez’s case had he come to her office and presented his version of events as laid out in his letter.

She wrote that apparent contradictory information in the evidence she received from Fuller led her to conclude she probably would have subsequently dismissed Gonzalez as a client.

“Reviewing all the evidence presented as it is, I do not believe that sexual harassment occurred,” she wrote.

Cambreleng told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she wasn’t aware of Sam Adams’ involvement in the case until after Fuller’s report was published.

“But knowing who was involved doesn’t change anything,” she said. “Given the information I had and assuming there was no statute of limitations, it’s my opinion that there wasn’t enough evidence to support a legal claim.”

Judy Snyder, a prominent Portland employment attorney, said she didn’t believe Fuller’s methods were entirely unusual. She likened it to a large company hiring counsel to investigate allegations against a CEO by an employee.

“Sam Adams isn’t a large corporation, but he has to turn to someone to defend himself,” she said. “These are very serious allegations that have been made public, and the responsible thing to do is to say, ‘It’s being investigated and here are the results of that investigation.’”

Snyder said it is common for all parties involved to be interviewed, however. Some evidence viewed as contradictory could be cleared up through direct conversation, she said, and it could be possible Gonzalez detailed what he was experiencing to people outside of work.

Snyder said she likely would have come to the same conclusion as Velure and Cambreleng after reading a summary of the evidence in Fuller’s report due to the apparent lack of corroboration of Gonzalez’s account.

J. Ashlee Albies, a civil rights and employment attorney, said she felt uncomfortable that Fuller repeatedly labeled the review as an independent investigation in his report, due to Gonzalez’ lack of participation and Fuller being hired by the person accused.

She described the report as “not a fully developed record” and said that it didn’t appear the process was set up in a way for Gonzalez to properly defend himself or have legal representation. Albies said Gonzalez, for example, could have had legitimate reasons to withhold some information from a letter to the city council or a media interview.

“These cases are more complicated and life is more nuanced than the summary of this investigation shows,” Albies said.

“I completely understand that the statute of limitations has passed and the accused wants to defend themselves and there doesn’t appear to be a legitimate way to do that. But I don’t think this is an adequate substitute for the civil legal system.”

Albies admitted if Adams had been her client, that she didn’t immediately know what the right answer would be.

-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey

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