Jay NealAfter a former director filed a claim of racial discrimination, leaders at Georgia’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council said Nicole Jenkins did not work well with important outside agencies and let contracts run hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. They also said her subordinates “displayed similar traits and responses as the victims of domestic violence.”
Jenkins, a 10-year employee of the council who headed the victim compensation division, filed the discrimination lawsuit in U.S. District Court on April 30. The only black woman among the agency’s four division directors at the time, she said she received positive feedback at work until Jay Neal became executive director in July 2016. Neal is a former state representative from LaFayette.
“She would make you feel small, make you feel extreme anxiety, or verbally dress you down like a drill instructor in the military,” a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council human resources employee wrote in a statement to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in January 2018, parroting a complaint the department supposedly received about Jenkins from a contractor.
Jenkins’ attorney, Adian Miller, said council leadership took complaints about her out of context. In response to a Times Free Press request for any records of discipline, the council provided one letter from May 2017, when she was suspended without pay. Neal fired her about two weeks later.
“Ms. Jenkins regularly received promotions and raises, and had absolutely no issues recorded with her performance until the date that Jay Neal, a Caucasian male, assumed control as her supervisor in July 2016,” Miller wrote to the EEOC. “The [council] would have the EEOC believe that Ms. Jenkins was a poorly performing employee, but the facts of Ms. Jenkins’ long and positive history at the [council] directly contradicts such a self-serving assertion.”