Kansas City staffer doxxed for Butker social media post deserved better | Opinion
I’m not all that surprised that Andrea Watts, the Kansas City employee falsely accused of doxxing Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city. Good for her. City leadership could have done more to protect the well-being of one of its employees.
Instead of doing what was right and immediately clearing Watts’ name, city officials allegedly demeaned and demoted Watts from her job as a content creator for the city, according to the lawsuit.
And now taxpayers could potentially be on the hook for legal fees associated with this suit. Kansas City leaders must do more to shield their employees from harm and be better stewards of the city’s coffers.
Nothing could possibly make up for the hate Watts received online. But I hope she is able to rebound from the anguish she’s faced since she was outed for something she did not do.
Kansas City owed Watts, currently a senior administrative assistant for the city, more. Neither she nor any other city communications employees involved in this unfortunate mishap deserved to be doxxed online.
And when they were, officials failed at every turn to protect their professional reputations.
In the suit, Watts claims she was discriminated against and faced retaliation after she asked city officials to simply clear her name. As with any lawsuit, Watts must prove her accusations in a court of law — but if receiving a right-to-sue letter from the Missouri Commission on Human Rights is any indication, credible evidence exists to back her claims.
Last year, online sleuths wrongly identified Watts and two other women in the city communications department as being responsible for doxxing Butker on X — but they didn’t. To protect these employees from further harm, I won’t name them here.
I wish yahoos online would have used the same discretion — wishful thinking on my part, right?
Unfair and dangerous
The staffer who did write the tacky but harmless post listing Butker’s city of residence as Lee’s Summit no longer works for the city — fired soon after this needless controversy started. That staffer was never publicly identified but Watts and others were.
And the vitriol that followed was vile, disgusting and dangerous. She was labeled a diversity hire, racial epithets towards her were unrelenting and she was called some very nasty sexually explicit names. She also received death threats and an address associated with her was posted online.
When Watts asked city officials to release a statement distancing her from the post, the city failed to do so, according to the lawsuit. From there, Watts claims in legal documents that she experienced retaliation after her complaints and faced hostility from management and supervisors, according to the lawsuit.
“To this day, the City Manager, Assistant City Manager, the Mayor (Quinton Lucas), nor the City Council have ever communicated to the public and media the truth — that Plaintiff Andrea Watts had nothing to do with the text about (Butker) living in Lee’s Summit, and they have known that to be the truth the same night the post was made,” the suit contends.
Almost immediately after right-wing extremists and nut jobs doxxed Watts, our Editorial Board called on Lucas and other city officials to protect Watts and the other city employees being attacked online. Instead, Lucas put out a vague statement that did little to address the hate being faced by these employees.
“Our concern here is that the name, likeness and address associated with a Kansas City employee — the true definition of doxxing — made the rounds on social media nearly a whole day before the city responded,” we wrote then. “Too bad this poor innocent worker was wrongly identified. Not that we would want the actual person responsible for the post outed, either. But Kansas City’s failure to defend its employee with expediency is maddeningly frustrating.”
Did City Hall culture fail her?
Under former City Manager Brian Platt’s leadership, morale inside City Hall deteriorated. And the communications department — where Watts worked — wasn’t spared from Platt’s off-putting management style.
Just recently, a federal jury awarded former city communications director Chris Hernandez nearly $1 million for pushing back against Platt’s suggestion it was OK to mislead the public and media. This assertion ultimately contributed to Platt being let go and is mentioned in Watts’ lawsuit.
By the way, Hernandez settled with the city for $1.4 million.
“Due to the City Manager and Assistant City Manager’s communication strategy avoiding transparency and withholding the truth from the media and public to protect their professional reputations, they subjected (Watts) to horrendous race and sex harassment and death threats, because they refused to take the simple and reasonable requested step to publicly clear (Watts’) name.”
If proven true, those responsible for causing Watts additional harm in face of online harassment should no longer hold any positions of power at Kansas City Hall.
