By Brielle Entzminger and Courteney Stuart
A week after tweeting that a city employee had been at the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and faced no consequence, former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville and 10 individuals alleging she was wrongfully terminated from her position in late 2021 on the basis of her race and gender.
“The City of Charlottesville and CPD was and still is so invested in its racial paternalism, misogyny, and nepotism, they would rather conspire to oust me than dismantle or confront corrupt, violent individuals in CPD and city government,” Brackney said in a press conference announcing the suit on Wednesday, June 15, in front of federal court in downtown Charlottesville.
According to the suit, as part of her “mandate” to reform the police department after her hiring in 2018, Brackney discovered “unlawful, criminal, racist behaviors as well as police violence, corruption, departmentally inappropriate, misogynistic, and/or discriminatory behaviors and harassment and threats within Defendants police department.”
After taking steps to address those issues including firing several officers and dismantling the SWAT team, the suit claims that two defendants met to formulate a survey of police officers in the department. The suit alleges the survey was intended to elicit negative responses about Brackney and that additional defendants subsequently conspired to use the survey results as the basis for her termination. The suit alleges that no similar survey was conducted on white male city employees.
In addition to naming the city as a defendant, the 73-page lawsuit names former interim city manager Chip Boyles, current and former City Council members Lloyd Snook, Sena Magill, and Heather Hill; Mike Wells, president of the Police Benevolent Association; Bellamy Brown, former chair of the Police Civilian Review Board; former assistant police chief Jim Mooney; current acting Police Chief Tito Durette; City Attorney Lisa Roberts; and former Charlottesville communications director Brian Wheeler.
Defendants in the case declined to comment, but C-VILLE Weekly legal analyst Scott Goodman says despite Brackney’s claim that she has recordings and other documentation to prove her allegations, convincing a jury her firing was connected to her race and gender may be a challenge.
“She’s just going to have to prove it in court,” Goodman says. “In my opinion, what she’s hoping to do is to scare the city, to shake the city into paying her a lot of money so that she won’t go forward with these threats to air all this dirty linen.”
The lawsuit came a week after Brackney accused the city government of taking no action against an employee who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Mayor Lloyd Snook claimed last week that the employee—who he said he could not name publicly—was “admitted” to the Capitol while doing “freelance photography,” and left when they were asked to leave.
Snook said former assistant police chief Jim Mooney concluded in a report that “no crime that CPD had authority to investigate had been committed,” and that Brackney soon turned the case over to the FBI in Richmond. “As long as they were allowed in by the Capitol police and they left when told, they would not seem to have committed a crime and it would seem that the FBI agreed,” Snook told C-VILLE last Wednesday.
However, the mayor has now seen videos—which he claims the city government did not have before—that “seem to show a different picture.” Snook has identified the employee: IT analyst Allen Groat, who works with the police department, sheriff’s office, fire department, and rescue squad.
“I have since seen a memo that Jim Mooney had sent to City leadership [to] John Blair, then Acting City Manager, and Chief Brackney. None of the three of them is still with the City, so we were trying to piece together the story from dim memories of those not directly involved,” Snook said in a statement sent to C-VILLE on Friday. “The last information that I had been emailed from City staff had taken out the reference to the person having had a video that showed him being admitted.”
Snook’s change of tune comes after activist Molly Conger exposed Groat’s Twitter account, @r3bel1776, with pro-insurrection messages last Wednesday. (Groat confirmed to C-VILLE that the account belongs to him.)
In November 2020, Groat called on those who “love America” to “defend the republic by any means necessary.” He also shared photos of himself with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the Proud Boys at a Trump rally. The following month, he claimed “soon blood will be shed to prevent the theft of our republic,” and tweeted a photo of a Black Lives Matter mural in New York City—with the caption “Fuck BLM!!! Time to uninstall!!” And in a tweet made just days before the insurrection, Groat again shared his intentions to “force Congress [to] #DoNotCertify the fraudulent election results” at the “#WildProtest” in D.C.
In body-worn police camera footage obtained by Conger, Groat can be seen inside the Capitol recording on his phone. When police asked the rioters to leave, Groat did not. “We love you guys…it’s their fault not ours,” he told the police, motioning to Congress.
Groat has previous criminal charges—in 2020, he pleaded guilty to aggressive driving with intent to injure, after chasing a woman and pulling a gun on her at a red light. It remains unclear if Groat still works for the city.
Brackney also pushed back against Snook’s initial response, claiming the FBI interviewed Mooney and planned to arrest Groat last year. “Boyles & IT director were informed the employee was dangerous & to revoke his IT access/privileges. Instead @cvillepolice & @CvilleCityHall revoked my access/privileges,” she tweeted last Thursday.
