Retiring Public Defender Robert Wesley created an environment of sexual harassment, fear and vengeance, current and former attorneys say.
Updated: Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously reported that Lenora Easter was fired from the Public Defender's Office and misused Family and Medical Leave. She was not. VoxPopuli regrets the error.
“Don’t you go asking me to give you road head.”
The attorney doesn’t recall exactly how Public Defender Robert Wesley ended up in her car. Maybe the long-serving Democrat asked for a ride. Maybe she offered to drive him. What she does remember with absolute clarity is that as the two of them drove together from the Orange County Courthouse to the Sorosis Club for an after-work political event where other attorneys from the Ninth Circuit’s Public Defender’s Office were gathering, all Wesley could talk about was blowjobs.
“He told me a story about him receiving road head, and then we were there,” said the attorney, who did not want to use her name out of fear of retaliation, even though she no longer practices law in Florida.
“I remember being shocked. I was so jarred by that.” But she told VoxPopuli in a phone interview that she learned the way to stay in Wesley’s good graces was to humor him. “You laugh at all of his jokes and everything he says is so funny, and you got to go along to get along. So I’m sure I just laughed.”
Kortney Daly had just rejoined the Public Defender’s Office in December 2023 after working there for three years and then spending two years in private practice. She told VoxPopuli that Wesley grabbed her at the office Christmas party and fondled her rear-end.
“He said Welcome home, and he pulled me in for a side hug, and his hand trailed down,” Daly said in a phone interview. “I was trying to pull away as soon as I could … but I also didn’t want to make a big deal of it because I’d been back two weeks and I couldn’t cause any problems. Even though that shouldn’t be considered a problem, I just knew how that would end.”
In 2020, a paralegal filed a complaint against Wesley and the Public Defender's Office with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Florida Commission on Human Relations (FCHR). According to the complaint, obtained by VoxPopuli, Wesley lured her into his office by requesting a file and then showed her four soft-core porn videos on his work computer. The videos were from a venue in Osceola County called the Sausage Castle, “where they have a bunch of sex parties.”
"He pulled me in for a side hug, and his hand trailed down. I was trying to pull away as soon as I could."
Her complaint detailed a litany of additional harassments — including Wesley telling her that he’d had sex with a woman while she was passed out drunk. She noted that she had been initially afraid to go to the EEOC and FCHR because she worried Wesley would “do something” to prevent her from being admitted to the Florida Bar. Once she became a lawyer, though, she filed her complaint and won a settlement for sexual harassment and fostering a toxic work environment. The amount in the paralegal’s settlement was not disclosed, but the average out-of-court settlement, according to the EEOC, is $36,798.
“Everyone is scared of him”
On Jan. 6, 2025, Robert Neal Wesley, 71, will step down after 24 years as Public Defender for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, representing the people of Orange and Osceola counties who cannot afford attorneys when they’ve been arrested and charged with crimes.
Whatever else Wesley may be remembered for — aggressive defense of clients, boosting salaries for the attorneys in his office; clothing drives to outfit indigent clients for court appearances — part of his legacy is a hostile workplace where he was known as a mercurial, often paranoid boss who yelled at employees, fired attorneys on a whim and harassed those who worked for him — particularly women who he passed over for raises, harassed sexually and harangued for getting pregnant.
It’s a testament to the culture of fear and reprisals that Wesley is said to have cultivated in his office that even after the 2017 #MeToo movement saw prominent men lose their jobs (and go to prison) for creating hostile, sexually abusive workplaces, he appears to have largely escaped media attention and accountability.
“People were worried about losing their jobs or being moved to Osceola County or a different division because that would often happen if somebody said something or did something, and it made management unhappy,” said Tiffany Colbert, a former assistant public defender who now practices civil defense law. “You would see that happen to your colleagues and kind of keep your head down and try not to upset the apple cart, so to speak.”
Wesley even seems to have gotten away with physically attacking an Orange County Corrections officer. Several years ago, Capt. Dennis Warren had made some comments about the Public Defender's Office during a meeting that angered Wesley. According to an email Warren wrote, obtained by VoxPopuli, Wesley later caught him alone in a courthouse elevator and “physically pinned me into a corner inside the elevator. As he pinned me, he squeezed my body against the corner with his massive frame pushing against me and making it difficult to breathe. While pinning me to the wall, he said twice, Okay ... I heard about what you said, do you have anything to say now?”
Warren described the attack as a “battery” in his email and said elevator cameras captured it. He later told VoxPopuli in another email that his boss at the time, Chief Tim Ryan, did not want to handle the incident formally out of concern for “undesired repercussions.”
Warren, now a private investigator, told VoxPopuli he considered the encounter to be “an act of gross intimidation” — a warning not to ever speak critically of the Public Defender’s Office again.
“Mr. Wesley is just a big bully,” he said in his email.
"He's vindictive in a way that you just know you either keep your mouth shut forever, or you face his wrath, which would include him trying to get you terminated at your job," said one attorney. "He knows everybody, and everyone is scared of him."
This story is based on interviews with a dozen people who currently work for or formerly worked for the Public Defender’s Office or in adjacent fields. Many requested anonymity to avoid Wesley’s anger and retribution.
Wesley did not respond to questions VoxPopuli sent to his office email. His Chief Assistant, Eileen Forrester, who also received the questions, told VoxPopuli she had no comment.
“Nowhere to go”
Melissa Vickers, 51, who won the Aug. 20 election in a landslide, takes office Jan. 7 as the first woman to ever run the Ninth Circuit Court’s Public Defender’s Office.
During the 18 years she worked in the Public Defender’s Office, Vickers endured her own share of “sexual jokes I didn’t really care for.” When she resigned in 2019, she told VoxPopuli, women began reaching out to her with their stories about Wesley's harassing them. A key reason she ran for the top job, she said, was to change the office culture.
"He's vindictive in a way that you just know you either keep your mouth shut forever, or you face his wrath."
According to the 2024 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey & Company and the women’s advocacy organization Lean In, 40 percent of women have encountered sexual harassment at work, and 14 percent have experienced sexual coercion or unwanted touch of a sexual nature — like Wesley’s hand on Daly’s derrière. Just 53 percent of women believe reporting it at work will make the harassment stop.
Women who had worked in the Public Defender’s Office told VoxPopuli that Wesley routinely mocked the Human Resources’ sexual harassment training seminars, dropping in to say he couldn’t stay because he would be “inappropriate.”
“He knew the things he was saying were not okay,” said the eight-year office veteran.
Indeed, the paralegal noted in her EEOC/FCHR complaint that she had gone to Human Resources in 2019 about Wesley’s language in the office, which included frequent use of the N-word as well as derogatory comments about Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Asians, those with intellectual disabilities. “The Human Resources Manager told me that Robert Wesley will not listen to anyone and that Robert Wesley was going to do whatever he wants to do,” she said in her complaint. “…making any further complaints about Robert Wesley’s behavior was futile.”
Winter Park therapist Cherlette McCullough finds that shocking. “They’ve normalized the abuse. Just think about that,” she said in a phone interview. “The department that’s supposed to protect employees has normalized the abuse. Where do you go from H.R.? There’s nowhere to go.”
“There’s something in the air”
Pregnancy was a particularly volatile issue in the office. Multiple women told VoxPopuli that Wesley resented attorneys taking maternity leave. And those who took maternity leave multiple times for additional children — Wesley was known to say they were abusing the system.
“He would make comments like he would only hire men if he were allowed because they wouldn’t leave when they were pregnant,” said the eight-year veteran assistant public defender. “He clearly had an issue with having to not fire us when we went on maternity leave. It was clearly a thing. He was always talking about it.”
Those weren’t the only comments. In 2019, when five assistant public defenders were pregnant at the same time, Wesley observed, “There’s something in the air … their legs.”
The crassness of the comment bothered the eight-year assistant public defender. “It took me two-and-a-half years to get pregnant. It was really hard for me. It's just very frustrating to have someone that is in a position of power over you talking about you like that,” she said. “And also having absolutely no idea what your actual life is like. He doesn't speak about the men in the office like that.”
She recalls dreading having to inform the executive office that she was expecting and would need to schedule time off.
“Everybody waited until the last minute,” she said. Announcing a pregnancy meant that “you were going to get passed over for a promotion … you couldn't keep your office … We weren't technically getting punished for being pregnant, but it was petty. And it was clear that he was unhappy with the fact that you were pregnant.”
"He clearly had an issue with having to not fire us when we went on maternity leave. He was always talking about it."
She recalls that when she came back from her maternity leave, she learned that everyone at her level had gotten a raise, except her.
“[Wesley] was upset that I expected that raise when I came back and was like, you were just gone for three months,” she said. “I was like, No, I had a baby. And also I was working while I was on maternity leave because there were cases that I didn't want to, or didn't feel like I could, give up.”
“I think you should run”
It was generally understood that the 2024 Public Defender race was not a safe topic for discussion in the office.
“It’s not like there was any kind of policy or email,” Daly said. “We just had warnings from people who had been around that if Bob found out that you supported Melissa, your job was at risk.”
That was quite a turnaround because at one time Vickers was considered his heir apparent. Wesley was the one who encouraged Vickers to run for his job when he retired.
“He said, I think you should run. You’d be a great fit," Vickers said in an interview with VoxPopuli, one of three we had during election season and afterward. "I said, Perfect. Teach me everything you know.”
But mistrust set in. Vickers heard that because she’d joined the League of Women Voters of Orange County, Wesley thought she was planning to run against him in 2016. (She wasn’t.) Wesley also believed she was trying "to run the office behind his back," according to a person with knowledge of the situation. (According to this person, Wesley had hearing aids that he refused to wear. But when he didn't, "he got really paranoid about everything. In his head, he would start making up what you must have said, and then he would just start screaming at you.")
In 2019, Wesley and Vickers had a major blowup over a training for new county court attorneys that Wesley had asked Vickers to organize, then took over himself and accused her of not preparing. (She had.) Vickers was scheduled to go on medical leave, so she had arranged the training, right down to the thank you notes for speakers, before going into the hospital.
But one observer thought there was more to the blowup. She told VoxPopuli that Wesley had said that Vickers wasn’t in the hospital at all but had gone to Tallahassee to “talk shit about him” to state legislators. Vickers told VoxPopuli that at no point in 2019 did she travel to Tallahassee.
During the quarrel, Vickers reached her limit and resigned. “It was a heat of the moment thing,” she said. “It was like, Fine, I resign. There you go. You have it.”
This was July, and Wesley sent Vickers to the Osceola office to serve out the remainder of her notice, through October. “Osceola was always his way of punishing people,” she said. (Numerous former assistant public defenders confirmed that.)
In August, she was caught venting her annoyance to another senior level attorney through the office instant message system. In one message she said two of her colleagues could “both fucking rot in hell beside Bob.” Vickers asked her friend to immediately delete the message after she sent it, and they went on to chit-chat about getting together for lunch.
The Employee Computer Usage Policy states that office communications are routinely monitored, so it wasn’t long before the message thread was discovered and shown to Wesley. (That same policy also states that accessing pornography on office computers is prohibited.)
Vickers acknowledged that it wasn’t her finest moment. “I certainly didn't mean it. I was very frustrated with the fact that everything was happening the way it was happening. I knew I needed to leave the [Public Defender’s] office, I didn't want to leave the office, but I knew I needed to.”
A day or two later, Vickers found that her ID badge no longer gained her entry into the Osceola Courthouse. She couldn’t login to her computer. In her personal email, she found a missive from Wesley that he was accepting her resignation immediately.
Interestingly, he agreed to pay out Vickers’ vacation time and remaining leave time through Sept. 9, provided that she signed a document promising not to sue him or the Public Defender’s Office. Vickers still doesn’t know why Wesley thought she might file a lawsuit, especially since he’s maintained that he forced her out. She speculated that he might have been generally “concerned about me suing for a hostile work environment.”
"That doesn’t surprise me that he would make her sign that," said an assistant public defender. "She knows where the bodies are buried. She has a lot of knowledge that he would not want her talking about.”
“Your job was at risk”
Five years later, in 2024, Wesley seemed to be doing what he could to hamper Vickers' election for Public Defender. Initially, she was unopposed. People with knowledge of the situation told VoxPopuli that Wesley went candidate shopping to find someone, anyone, to run against her.
After striking out with several potential candidates (some say 10), he endorsed Lenora Easter, a former assistant public defender who had gone on to work for the Bronx Defenders in New York, pioneers of the holistic defense concept of bringing housing, addiction management and immigration services into public defenders' offices to better serve clients.
Wesley also dredged up the internal instant-message thread from 2019 and fed it to the Orlando Sentinel in an attempt paint Vickers as “devious” and “toxic.” Vickers still won the paper's endorsement.
"I'm getting paid less than people with less experience than me because I supported Melissa. Really?"
Inside the Public Defender's Office, two attorneys dared to openly support Vickers.
"One of our managers had publicly supported her, and I wasn't going to let her hang out in the wind by herself," said an attorney who's worked in the office since 2005. "I made sure that any posts ... did not disparage Lenora Easter because I really like Lenora Easter. I think Lenora Easter is a great attorney. I just think Melissa was born to be the public defender of this particular office."
Those two attorneys are still employed by the Public Defender's Office. But Daly — who had tried to explain to a worried social worker that Vickers had no plans to axe all the social workers if she won the election — was not so fortunate. In June, Wesley fired her with a 14-second voicemail. She believes he was making her an example.
"Many people believe it was a message," Daly told VoxPopuli in a recent text. "It was meant to instill fear, and it worked.”
Daly's firing had a chilling effect on the office, one of the Vickers-supporting attorneys confirmed.
" It was a huge shift. Everybody stuck to themselves. Nobody felt comfortable talking about anything. It took until Aug. 20 [the election] for people to finally feel like, Okay, I can breathe a little easier now. But people are still scared, you know?"
“Nobody asked me what happened”
As they say, "No good deed goes unpunished." In trying to convince her coworker that a plan to get rid of social workers was too bonkers to be true — "We need them on our cases. It wouldn't make sense to just cut an entire department” — Daly encouraged the social worker to ask Vickers herself about what the office would be like with her as the boss. Vickers was holding a campaign event on the down low just for staff from the Orange County and Osceola County offices to ask questions. Daly provided the details. Doing that, she said, exposed her support for Vickers. That information filtered back to Wesley on the exact same day that Daly’s supervisor went to him to request a raise for her.
Now, just to rewind for a moment, when Daly came back to the Public Defender’s Office in late 2023, it was because she had a passion for criminal defense but didn’t care for the way private practice billing dictated her ability to defend her clients. The government had more resources for client defense, but the tradeoff was lower salaries. However, when she was hired back, it was at a salary that was still a lot lower — $6,000 lower, about $500 a month — than even the other attorneys in her division.
“They said it wouldn’t be fair for me to make that private practice money and then come back and make the same that they do now. They said I had to earn my keep. So I did that,” Daly said. “I tried six cases to verdict. That’s about a trial a month. And I’d done four of those trials in the six weeks preceding my termination.”
Coincidentally, those six cases were the last verdicts she needed to qualify for board certification — something that none of the other attorneys in her division had completed. She had planned with her supervisor that once she’d logged those six verdicts, it would be time to ask for the $6,000 raise to put her on par with everyone else in her division.
But Wesley denied the raise.
“[My supervisor] said that Bob said no to the raise because of this conversation that I had had with somebody," Daly said. "Basically the gist of it is … in this conversation I had shown support for Melissa. I was like, Really? I'm getting paid less than people with less experience than me because I supported Melissa. Really?”
She said her supervisor told her they’d approach Wesley again about the raise in a few weeks because he was known to “forget things,” and it was possible he would change his mind.
Daly decided to work from home for the rest of the day. “I was upset because he wasn't going to give me a raise over supporting Melissa. I thought that was really crappy.”
At 3 p.m. that afternoon, she received a voice mail via email from Wesley informing her that she was fired: “Miss Daly, you no longer serve at a pleasure of the Public Defender in Ninth Judicial Circuit due to your gossiping ways and immaturity.”
That was it. No amount of intervention from her supervisor could help. Daly told VoxPopuli she never got the chance to speak with Wesley or plead her own case.
“I was never given an opportunity to even say what my side of the story was or what happened in that conversation. I don't even know what he based [my termination] on,” Daly said. “At no point did anybody ask me what happened.”
It's not lost on her that this went down in the Public Defender’s Office, the place where the accused are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.
“Metaphorically speaking,” Daly said, “I was executed on sight.”
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