Filner victim: Problems surfaced early on

The first woman to publicly accuse Bob Filner of sexual harassment said Tuesday her initial sense of a problem came after the former mayor’s State of the City Address in January 2013.

“He kissed me,” Irene McCormack Jackson said during an interview on KPBS radio. “I also saw other things going on. I watched the way he treated the office staff. Not just the women, but the men as well. Screaming and yelling at them, telling them they were incompetent, stupid. It was an office that people hated being in.”

The interview with KPBS Midday Edition host Maureen Cavanaugh was the first time McCormack Jackson has discussed at length her experience with Filner, who became the city’s first Democratic mayor in two decades. More than 20 women would follow her with allegations of harassment or groping against the former longtime congressman.

The charges that rocked City Hall and reverberated around the nation led to his resignation in August of last year. He later pleaded guilty to three charges — one felony and two misdemeanors — related to the accusations.

The KPBS live interview came exactly one year after McCormack Jackson appeared before reporters in a news conference and said Filner had told her she should come work sans panties, groped her and held her in what infamously became known as “the Filner headlock.”

She appeared with her attorney, Gloria Allred, and sued the city of San Diego and Filner.

“I knew he did it to other people,” said McCormack Jackson, who was Filner’s chief communications aide. “I knew the Filner headlock was how he did it to other people.”

She described Filner as a nightmare for his closest staffers.

“Abusive behavior increased the point people were going home crying,” she said. “You always felt like you were waiting to be yelled at any moment. It was a very difficult atmosphere to work at when he was there.”

To make it through each day, she described staffers adopting a bunker mentality and camaraderie.

“We always looked at how do we get things done efficiently if at all possible for the citizens of San Diego.”

Efforts to get Filner to resign or at least apologize for his behavior before she went public fell flat, she said.

“I think the former mayor is probably wondering what happened to him, but I don’t feel pity or empathy or hatred or anger or anything,” she said. “I just feel really sad. But I am glad he is out of public office — he did not deserve to be there.”

She settled her sexual harassment lawsuit against the city earlier this year for $250,000.

“I didn’t want to bankrupt the city, but I wanted some income so I could take six or seven months off and heal, and that is what I have done,” said McCormack Jackson, who left a higher paying job as a vice president for public policy with the Port of San Diego to work for Filner. Earlier, she had worked as an editor and reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Coming forward in that first news conference made her nauseous, she said.

Before going public, she said she would deal with Filner by pulling away from him. She said she was fearful of filing a complaint with the city’s human resources department because she believed anything she said would be immediately reported to Filner.

“When you work for somebody very powerful who can destroy your career just by saying a word to somebody else, you have to very thoughtful and skilled about how you bring this to somebody else’s attention,” she said.

Among all the troubling situations, she said two in particular involving women around age 30 made an impact on her. The then 70-year-old Filner, she said, isolated one in his private City Hall office.

“When she came out she looked surprised and left right away,” she said.

Filner accosted the second woman in a hallway and that was when she decided to make her complaint.

“I did this for other women and other men who had been at the sharpest edge of the arrow of someone who is abusing power. It’s an awful place to be,” she said, later adding: “It was stunning how big the story got for me.”

She told Cavanaugh she has never heard from Filner, who resides in a downtown San Diego condominium.

Since Filner’s resignation and Republican Kevin Faulconer’s election as mayor earlier this year, McCormack Jackson said she went through a period where she was a hermit and suffered migraine headaches. But with the help of friends and family, she said she’s emerged stronger and happier and started work on a book.

“I can’t not write a book about this. But it’s not just about the experience,” she said. “It’s a book to really help those who are in the same position I am and how to get out of that position and really empower yourself.”

Update: An earlier version of this story reported Irene McCormack Jackson saying that former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner kissed her after his swearing-in ceremony. She has since amended that statement by saying the kiss occurred after his State of the City address in January 2013.