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Kevin White's lawyer continues cross-examination of accuser today

News Channel 8 photos by PAUL LAMISON

Alyssa Ogden says that she was fired by Kevin White for refusing his sexual advances.

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By MIKE SALINERO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 17, 2009

Updated: 08/18/2009 09:30 am

TAMPA - Cross examination of Alyssa Ogden continues this morning in the sexual harassment trial of Hillsborough County Commissioner Kevin White.

On Monday, Ogden told jurors she suffered sleeplessness, depression and low self-esteem after undergoing seven months of periodic sexual harassment from her boss, County Commissioner Kevin White.

Ogden, 24, took the stand in the first day of trial in her sexual harassment lawsuit against White and Hillsborough County. Ogden's federal suit says White fired her in November 2007 because she resisted his sexual advances.

The trial before U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara is expected to run through Friday.

Ogden maintained a mostly calm demeanor throughout questionin on Monday from her attorney, Ronald Fraley, although she occasionally reached for a tissue to wipe away tears. She said she stayed in her job as White's aide because her mother and stepfather's house was in foreclosure and they needed her annual salary of $43,000.

"I told him, 'I'm not going to get into a relationship with you to secure my future,'" Ogden said she told White after one of his advances.

White's attorney, Steven Wenzel, painted a different picture in cross-examining Ogden. He said she never reported White to the county human resources department or to county officials.

Wenzel said Ogden also didn't mention sexual harassment to human resources officials who questioned her alone after White recommended she be fired for poor job performance. Instead, she cleared out her desk and days later filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

"The first time anyone heard about this problem that could have done something about this problem was in a newspaper," Wenzel said.

Much of the testimony Monday revolved around a trip to Atlanta that White invited Ogden on less than a week after she started work in April 2007. Ogden alleged that during their one-night stay in the Georgia capital, White talked his way into her hotel room and then asked to sleep in her bed. She said she refused.

"I was very scared," Ogden said. "I was thinking, 'I'm in Atlanta by myself and in the bed right next to me is a stranger."

White, though, says he invited Ogden on the Atlanta trip as a favor to C. Blythe Andrews Jr., a man in his 70s who owns the Florida Sentinel Bulletin, a twice-weekly newspaper. White said Andrews expressed a romantic interest in Ogden, something the publisher denies.

Under Wenzel's questioning, Ogden admitted she let Andrews buy her clothes during a trip they took to an Atlanta shopping mall with White, his uncle, Andre Moses White, and the uncle's female companion. Ogden said she had first refused the gift from Andrews but had been talked into accepting the clothes by the uncle's girlfriend.

"She said don't hurt his feelings; he's trying to do something nice for you," Ogden said.

Wenzel asked why Ogden let White into her hotel room. She said he told her his other sleeping arrangements had fallen through and all the other rooms in the hotel were booked. The attorney then asked whether she had recorded White's visit to the room with her cell phone camera.

"No, I didn't ask Mr. White to stand still so I could take a cell-phone picture," Ogden said.

After the trip to Atlanta, Ogden said, White started making inappropriate remarks about her body and her underwear. He tried to kiss her in an elevator in the County Center and continually asked her to give him a "chance," she said.

Ogden said that after she was fired, she became reclusive and started having nightmares involving White. She sought psychiatric care and last year started working again as a nanny for a family that had employed her before her job with White.

Wenzel challenged Ogden's statements that White's actions had so troubled her that she hid from the world in her parents' home. He argued that photos of Ogden be admitted as evidence - one, the lawyers said, that showed Ogden and her sister at a Tampa Bay Lightning game taken the evening she got back from the trip to Atlanta. That and a photo of Ogden and her sister at the beach, the lawyers said, show her having fun despite statements that she was devastated.

Judge Lazzara said he didn't see anything wrong with the photos. "I assume young people go to the beach in their bathing suits, and what's wrong with this?"

Still, the judge told Fraley, Ogden's attorney, he would not allow the photographs be used to paint Ogden as being "sexually disposed."

Sitting on the opposite end of the courtroom with attorneys between them, Ogden and White did not have direct view of each other. During Ogden's testimony, White looked directly at her with no expression.

Reporter Mike Salinero can be reached at (813) 259-8303.

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