Rep. Henry Cuellar Tried to Discredit a Staffer He Fired at 28 Weeks Pregnant
Court documents show that the congressman himself requested staffers write letters about the woman’s job performance after he fired her.
Politics
In August 2018, Kristie Small was newly serving as the acting chief of staff for Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat, when she told him she was pregnant. Small requested maternity leave via email, and Cuellar responded that they would need to talk about the leave—and the 90-day probationary period for all new hires. It was the first time Small, who already had a young daughter, had ever heard about the policy, which wasn’t in the employee handbook. Cuellar never approved her parental leave and, on October 16, he fired her over the phone, citing poor job performance, while she was in her third trimester. About two weeks later, Small delivered her baby at 30 weeks pregnant. It was a stillbirth.
Small filed a lawsuit against Cuellar’s office in May 2019, alleging both sex and pregnancy discrimination under federal law and noting that she’d worked for another congressman for 13 years without any performance issues. Cuellar’s office tried to dismiss the lawsuit on summary judgment and submitted letters from Small’s colleagues about her job performance but, according to court documents reviewed by Jezebel, Cuellar himself requested staffers write these letters after he fired Small, and at least five were dated after Small filed her lawsuit.
In denying the dismissal attempt by Cuellar’s office, federal judge Trevor N. McFadden wrote, “Indeed, Cuellar solicited written statements from his staffers about Small’s performance after he fired her…And the staffers provided their statements after Small filed this action in May 2019,” McFadden said. “Perhaps Cuellar was simply looking for corroboration of Small’s poor performance, but a jury might also see this as an attempt to collect post hoc justifications.”
The staff letters, reviewed by Jezebel, allege that Small failed to catch typos in press releases and sometimes arrived at work late or left early. (Again, Small was pregnant and the mother of a toddler.) One letter notes that Small was looking for a new daycare for her daughter. That same letter said one day “in the middle of the annual Taste of Laredo event (which is very important to the Congressman and office),” Small asked a colleague to leave early and give her and her daughter a ride back to the Capitol Hill office.
News of Cuellar’s attempt to discredit the fired staffer, which has not been previously reported, comes as the San Antonio-area Congressman—the last anti-abortion Democrat in the U.S. House—is facing extra scrutiny, following the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion. In September, Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against the Women’s Health Protection act, a bill that would codify the right to have an abortion into federal law.
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