Sex Quiz Costs El Segundo $60,000

Nearly 10 years after she was turned down for a job as an El Segundo police officer after she answered detailed questions about her sex life, Deborah Thorne Volkert has won a $60,000 settlement from the city, her attorney announced Thursday.

The settlement, reached earlier this week, concludes a precedent-setting court battle that helped set limits on government’s ability to invade the privacy of people applying for public jobs.

“Even more important than the final settlement . . . is the fact that as a result of Ms. Volkert’s legal battle, employers may no longer engage in unrestricted fishing expeditions into a prospective employee’s private sex life,” said her attorney, Gloria Allred.

Volkert, 35, now a homemaker and mother living in Torrance, said in an interview Thursday that she is “just very happy that it’s finally over.”

“It’s been a long, difficult battle, and I feel that I’ve weathered through it very well,” she said.

Volkert was working at the El Segundo Police Department as a clerk-typist in 1978 when she applied for a job as a police officer.

In addition to physical agility tests and a psychological exam, Volkert was required to take a polygraph test in which she was asked a number of personal questions, including, “When was the first time you ever had sex? Have you ever had an abortion or miscarriage? Who was the father? What kind of birth control devices do you use?”

During the interview, Volkert revealed that she had had an affair with a married police officer then employed by the El Segundo department, an affair that had ended a year after she suffered a miscarriage.

Though Volkert was ranked second overall among candidates for the job (behind another woman candidate), a man who ranked third was hired. A Police Department official, she said, told her “he assumed that I would be out in the field, fooling around with the other men” because of her previous affair.

Volkert filed suit, seeking $2 million in damages. Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real ruled against her in the first go-around, but in a landmark decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back for the awarding of damages, ruling that her constitutional rights to privacy had been violated by questions that had no relationship to her performance on the job.

Rehearing the case, Real awarded Volkert only $812 in damages, and the case was successfully appealed again. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, the settlement negotiations commenced.

City officials referred comment on the case to their attorney, who was not available Thursday.

Volkert said the compensation was important because she has never been able to get a law enforcement job, despite her performance on the tests at El Segundo.

“I kind of gave up the idea after that,” she said. “At the time I was trying to get the job with the El Segundo Police Department, I had also applied at the Sheriff’s Department and with other cities, and I ran into roadblocks everywhere I went. Nobody wanted to hire me. They always brought up my run-in with El Segundo.”