Boston's never-ending sex harass case | Bay State's housing goals blasted as "unachievable"

Sox fans could have it even worse | No rate cuts until year end | Boston pol targets sex harassment accuser with defamation lawsuit | Signs of life and more trouble in Greater Boston office market | Honest but harsh take on Healey administration’s housing production goals |

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Blast from the past: Ousted years ago as Boston’s health chief amid sex harassment scandal, Felix G. Arroyo’s defamation lawsuit set to go to trial

It was 2018, at the height of #MeToo.

A young, one-time City Hall staffer named Hilani Morales filed an explosive sex harassment lawsuit against both the city and Felix G. Arroyo, a scion of one of the city’s most prominent political families.

After an investigation, then Mayor Marty Walsh fired Arroyo from his job as the city’s health chief.

Arroyo responded by filing a defamation lawsuit against Morales, who had worked under him, and then later brought a wrongful termination case against the city and Walsh.

Felix G. Arroyo

Seven years later, the legal battles over the explosive allegations rage on, with Arroyo’s defamation lawsuit set to go to trial next week in state court in Boston, according to court documents reviewed by Contrarian Boston.

Morales reached a $1 million settlement last year with city officials over her lawsuit, which alleged that Arroyo “manipulated” her into a sexual relationship, then harassed her when she cut things off.

After she filed a complaint with human resources, she contends she was demoted.

Among the more salacious allegations: That Arroyo spanked her and at one point grabbed her by the back of the neck when he found out about a meeting she had with HR, according to local media reports and court documents.

As part of her $1 million settlement, Morales agreed to drop her claims – “with prejudice” - against the city and Arroyo, the Herald reported last year.

A former Boston city councilor, Arroyo has denied all the allegations, arguing that Morales was a bad employee who didn’t respond well to criticism and who made up accusations against him to save her job, the Boston Herald has reported.

The run-up to the impending defamation case has seen intense legal skirmishing by both sides over the past week.

Arroyo’s attorney struck out in a bid to force Walsh and his former chief of staff to testify and to bar the use of the term “hostile work environment,” court records show.

Nice try.

Interestingly, Arroyo’s legal team includes his brother, Ricardo, who was a city councilor himself until voters gave him his walking papers in 2023, in the wake of his own scandal.

Ricardo was hit with a $3,000 state ethics fine, having continued, even after he was elected to the city council, to represent his brother, Felix, in his sexual harassment case.

Ricardo Arroyo

Ricardo also saw his campaign for Suffolk County District Attorney implode after The Boston Globe reported that he had been investigated twice for sexual assault – but never charged – when he was a high school student. Arroyo countered he had never been informed of any investigation.

The family patriarch, their father Felix D. Arroyo, a former city councilor himself, has had his struggles, filing for bankruptcy last year.

The financial difficulties stemmed from legal debt racked up during the elder Arroyo’s stint as Suffolk register of probate in the 2010s, when he was suspended from his job during an investigation into serious issues with the management of the office.

A report by state court officials later found that probate office employees had undermined Arroyo and that “‘racial name-calling’ became a problem after he hired minority employees,” the Herald reported back in 2018.

File under: All in the family.

Grim outlook: Top expert on new apartment construction not sold on Bay State’s attempts to solve the housing crisis

Candor is a rare commodity these days, with the Bay State’s political culture dominated by CYA-style happy talk that avoids dealing directly with pressing – and controversial - issues.

So three cheers for Travis D’Amato, a top expert on the financing of new apartment and condo projects and one of the panelists at Wednesday’s market outlook event hosted by NAIOP Massachusetts.