John Duran and Ian Owens Battle Over Use of the Council Member’s Private Data

UPDATE:  The West Hollywood City Council and City Attorney Mike Jenkins will hold a closed meeting this evening to discuss Ian Owens’ lawsuit against the city. No further information about the meeting is available.

A lawyer for West Hollywood City Councilmember John Duran has asked a Superior Court judge to bar Ian Owens, Duran’s former Council deputy, from making public pictures of “naked” people found on the council member’s contact list and sharing other private data.

Owens is suing Duran, alleging sexual harassment. Duran, in a statement filed in the lawsuit last month, said Owens copied more than 6,000 personal, political, city and law firm contacts from Duran’s Outlook computer address files in June of last year, shortly after he filed the lawsuit against Duran and the City of West Hollywood and while he remained in the deputy job. According to Duran’s attorney, Matthew Hicks of Lozano Smith, copies of some contacts were filed with the court in November as evidence in Owens’ lawsuit. Hicks said some of those contacts also were given to Steve Rodig, who was hired by the city to investigate misbehavior by Council deputies, and to Michelle Rex, the former deputy to Councilmember John D’Amico and a friend of Owens, who also is contesting the elimination of her job.

In May 2015, Owens filed a lawsuit saying the city had wrongfully suspended him on false allegations that he spied on fellow deputy Fran Solomon when he was actually trying to report unlawful activity by Solomon, deputy to Councilmember John Heilman. Solomon had a fraught relationship with Owens’ friend Rex, which mirrored the fraught relationship D’Amico and Heilman had with one another.

In the suit Owens claimed he was the victim of retaliation for reporting Solomon’s alleged misconduct and that Duran sexually harassed him instead of helping him. Owens said Duran made sexual advances and talked about his sex life to Owens, allegations that Duran has denied. Owen is seeking unspecified damages in the lawsuit.

In an email exchange, Aanand Ghods-Mehtani, the attorney representing Owens, told Duran’s lawyer that he would redact the faces and names of the “naked” men found in Duran’s contact list. “We are sympathetic to the individuals whose naked pictures were place on public servers, and do not want to cause them any further embarrassment,” he said.  The photos that Ghods-Mehtani described as “naked” are actually pictures of  shirtless men, some of which came from Facebook accounts.

But he suggested that pictures of the men supported Owens’ claim against Duran. “Assuming … that Mr. Owens knew that certain of those individual were clients — which he did not necessarily know — it was still inappropriate to subject him to the pictures and descriptions at issue.”

As Duran’s deputy, Owens had access to both his personal, work and city government contact files. That’s because Duran wanted to set up a system that allowed his calendar and contact information to sync between computers at City Hall, at his law firm and his mobile phone. To protect the city’s data, West Hollywood insisted that all of Duran’s information be stored on a common server and that no one be given access to that information except Duran, using a private password. Duran gave that password to Owens when he became his permanent deputy in March 2013. In his court petition, Duran said that Owens was only supposed to enter information such as meeting schedules and phone numbers and email addresses and was not supposed to review or download his contacts.

Duran has asked that Owens and his attorney be forced to return all copies of his contact information and that the court not allow any of the information collected by Owens to be presented at his trial, which is now set for November.

In other developments, the five-member Association of Council Deputies union has filed an unfair practice charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board, alleging that by ending the deputy system the city violated a state law requiring a public agency to negotiate with representatives of an employee union before making a decision that would affect members of that union. Fran Solomon, who resigned her position before the City Council voted to end the deputy system, also has filed a complaint with the Public Employment Relations Board. Solomon argues that the city should have continued her employment for 90 days after her retirement under a provision of the city’s agreement with the union. The city has argued that that provision only applies to deputies who leave their position on the death of the council member to whom they report.

The City Council voted last June to end the deputy system, which was created when the city was incorporated in 1984. WEHOville’s revelation in January 2015 that Owens was the source of the allegations about misbehavior by Solomon sparked a heated debate about what came to be called “Deputygate.” Among the criticisms of the system were that some of the deputies, who make as much as $190,000 a year including benefits, didn’t come to work until 11 a.m., took long lunches, didn’t respond to residents’ telephone calls, engaged in illegal campaign activities for their bosses, spied on one another’s telephone calls, sniped at one another and interfered with the work of other city employees to promote the political interests of the council member to whom them report.