Campbell policewoman, hero of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting, is suing the department for battery and sexual harassment

Campbell Police Officer Margaret Leitz ran toward gunfire during the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting, saving a woman who had been shot in the head and helping others escape over a five-foot fence.

For her heroism, Campbell’s Police Chief Gary Berg awarded Leitz a Medal of Valor.

But now she is suing the city of Campbell, the police department and Berg for what she claims is ongoing sex discrimination and malicious harassment in connection with an injury she suffered while rescuing festival goers in Gilroy.

The city, police department and Berg did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Leitz, 43, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court that her colleagues, nearly all of them men, were warned in a briefing shortly after her 2012 appointment that she was a “pending sexual harassment lawsuit who was yet to take place’.

As a heterosexual woman, it was “automatically assumed” in the department that she would have sex with male colleagues, despite being in a monogamous relationship at the time, Leitz told the city of Campbell in a July statement of claim.

As she rose through the ranks to become a field training officer, award-winning hostage negotiator, crime scene technician, homicide detective, and supervisor, she continued to be treated differently because she was a woman and sexism was “standard practice” in the world. department, her lawsuit alleged. Supervisors and fellow officers doubted her ability to shoot and her willingness to fight combative suspects, and supervisors showed up to incidents solely to criticize her tactics, her lawsuit alleged.

“I always knew when I went into law enforcement that it was a male-dominated profession,” Leitz said in an interview Wednesday. “I knew it would be an uphill battle and it was a challenge I was willing to accept.”

Knowing her gender put her at a disadvantage, Leitz worked extra hard to make arrests — more than 800 in a decade — and advance in her career, she said.

“I was a hard charger,” Leitz said.

In her decade of active duty, Leitz pushed for, and eventually achieved, changes, including body armor designed for female officers and weapons that could be adapted to female officers who are smaller than men, said Leitz, who is five feet tall. -three and weighs 125 pounds.

“I didn’t always want to cause a stir, but I was very vocal about the way women were treated differently,” Leitz said. “Campbell’s answer to everything that’s ever been bought is, ‘Hey, this is the way it’s always been and this is the way it’s going to be.’”

Department members repeatedly “sexualized” Leitz, she alleged in the lawsuit. In 2014, a newly promoted sergeant took her aside and said he had heard that she and her boyfriend had broken up. The sergeant “explained that it is common for female officers to have sex with male officers at their own station, throughout the district, with random men they met on the job or during training,” Leitz’s statement said.

The sergeant “made it clear that he did not want the city of Campbell to look bad because of my anticipated promiscuous behavior,” according to the affidavit, filed as an exhibit in the lawsuit.