PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - Lawyers representing Maine sought medical records and the names of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists for a former state employee who alleges that she was bullied and harassed by supervisors when she refused to destroy public records, according to her own attorney.
The lawyer for Sharon Leahy-Lind, who has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the state over the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention documents, said Wednesday that the request was overly broad and likely an effort to damage her client’s credibility.
“I expect that they are going to claim that my client is unstable,” Cynthia Dill told Portland Press Herald (https://bit.ly/QHtxho ). “I believe they’re going to argue that these problems - the unlawful order to destroy public documents and the harassment that my client suffered - was not something that they did, but somehow the fault of my client.”
Lawyers representing the Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A federal magistrate judge denied many of the requests Tuesday, such as the documentation of Leahy-Lind’s health expenses since 2012.
But the judge ordered Leahy-Lind to comply with a narrower request for records related to physical or emotional ailments since 2011, saying those records were relevant because she claimed in her complaint that she was emotionally distressed.
Leahy-Lind has said she was ordered to destroy documents showing how the state planned to distribute more than $4 million in grants for the Healthy Maine Partnerships Program.
CDC officials testified before lawmakers in March after the state’s government watchdog agency found evidence that the process for selecting the grant winners was manipulated to come up with a different result and that officials had ordered documents to be destroyed.
Christine Zukas, Maine CDC deputy director, told the state’s Government Oversight Committee under sworn testimony that she destroyed the documents.
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