'What Color Panties You Have On?' and Other Legal Concerns

"What color panties you [sic] have on?" was the question that cost San Francisco District Attorney’s Office victim advocate Jovan Thomas his job on Friday. The overly friendly email query was addressed to Thomas' boss, city District Attorney Brooke Jenkins — along with their entire office.

Not exactly the kind of thing you want to cc to a building full of prosecutors, although Thomas claimed in a follow-up email — this is the kind of office where you've seriously got to stay on top of these email threads — that the message was a prank and meant for a fraternity brother.

“Please know this is not who I am as a person as I carry myself with respect and dignity,” Thomas wrote in the follow-up. “I am sincerely sorry and would never do such a thing on purpose."

But Bay Area Twitter/X user Dimitry Yakoushkin — self-described as a "Sex & Relationship Coach/Therapist, Writer, Decathlete. Queer" — argued that "The immediate apology email from Taylor makes it worse — he claims it was a joke with a frat brother. However, he clearly has his full signature in the email — meaning he sent it from a work laptop to a clearly visible recipient — his boss. Either way, this is not appropriate."

Yakoushkin was given screencaps of the email exchange by an anonymous source, effectively breaking the story on Twitter/X.

For her part, Jenkins denied in a statement that there is any "relationship between the District Attorney and the individual who sent this email," and I believe her. Jenkins also promptly announced that Thomas had been fired. "The District Attorney’s Office is committed to maintaining a professional office environment where all staff members are treated with dignity and respect and not subject to harassment or a hostile work environment."

But wait. It gets weirder.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Thomas "appeared to be responding to a calendar invite for an anti-discrimination meeting this week to memorialize the killing of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 in Wyoming."

Because when I think about responding to a scheduled work meeting about the murder a quarter century ago of a young man in a completely different part of the country, I think about asking my frat bro, "What color panties you [sic] have on?"

It's a common error, I'm sure.

There's a report today in the San Francisco Standard that Thomas was sued in 2018 for sexual harassment by a Jane Doe for "taking advantage of her sexually in the aftermath of a robbery and gang violence targeting her and her son."

The woman claimed that Thomas "stroked" her butt after meeting at the Bayview Victim Services office to discuss her case and then later asked her to come to his home, where they drank and had sex. She claimed that he repeatedly texted and called her, adding that she worried that if she turned down his sexual advances she wouldn't get victim's services, according to the complaint.

Maybe this is not the kind of person who should have been offered work as a victims' advocate. On the other hand, Thomas does did work for the San Francisco government, and it is the government's sacred duty to create victims when there aren't enough free-range victims in need of government administration.

I'm old enough to remember when sleazebags were smart enough to ask questions like "what color panties you [sic] have on?" in person, creating a "he said/she said" situation where it was almost impossible to prove that the sleazebag was, in fact, a sleazebag.

So we've made progress of a sort if you squint at the situation just right.

Another way to look at it is that there are trained lawyers who are such idiots (on top of being sleazebags) that they don't understand how email works.

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