Fired Newport police employees settle retaliation case

A husband and wife who sued Newport Beach and its police department for alleged retaliation and wrongful termination settled their lawsuits Monday for $500,000, according city officials.

The payout will come from the city’s insurance carriers, which made the decision to end the cases, according to City Manager Dave Kiff.

The agreement with former dispatcher Christine Hougan and former police Officer John Hougan puts an end to the first of two trials that was already two weeks into testimony.

It also lays to rest a dispute about whether Newport Beach police officers would have had to take the stand and answer questions about alleged misconduct on the job.

“I don’t like this aspect of litigation,” Kiff said of the settlement. “It means that the city won’t have an opportunity to present its side of the case to the jury, and we think the trial was going very well for us.”

City Hall denies any liability and was willing to take the case all the way to a verdict, according to an announcement.

In separate lawsuits, the Hougans claimed they were fired as payback for testimony that John Hougan gave in 2009 that helped a co-worker win a lawsuit alleging the department passed him over for promotions because of rumors that he was gay.

Christine Hougan also said her 2012 firing was unfairly motivated by the fact that she was a woman and that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

She was seeking more than $1 million in compensation for lost wages and therapy costs, her attorneys said.

Lawyers representing Newport Beach argued the city was justified in firing her for many reasons, including the times she cursed at a co-worker, wrote profane emails to her husband using her work email, bad-mouthed the chief of police by calling him an “idiot” and confronted him in public when she believed he had made a sexual comment about her during a private hearing.

John Hougan was fired in 2011 for regularly viewing pornography on work computers, according to city officials.

He was previously demoted from sergeant for the same reason, according to court testimony.

Christine Hougan’s case began with opening statements Jan. 13, while John Hougan’s was scheduled for later this year.

However, proceedings were recently bogged down while a judge weighed whether he would allow Newport Beach police officers to testify about personnel issues in Christine Hougan’s case.

Her lawyers hoped to demonstrate an uneven standard of discipline by asking the cops about an officer who was alleged to have had sex on the job and another who allegedly was drinking in a city-owned vehicle without being fired, according to court documents.

The city argued this was just a tactic to smear the department.

The officers’ disciplinary records are protected information, lawyers said, and their situations were so different from Christine Hougan’s that their testimony would be irrelevant.

“[Christine Hougan] held duties specific to that of a dispatcher and worked in the city’s dispatch center,” defendants argued in court documents. “Conversely, the city police officers do not work in the city’s dispatch center; held different ranks and different positions; were supervised by different individuals; and are not within the same protected class as plaintiff.”

The two sides were scheduled for a hearing on the issue Monday afternoon in Orange County Superior Court, but they instead reached the settlement, plaintiff’s attorney Larry Lennemann said.

[For the record, 6:50 a.m. Jan. 27: A previous version of this post incorrectly attributed information about the settlement amount to city officials and the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Only city officials revealed the settlement amount.]