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Kylie Jenner sued by former housekeeper alleging hostile work environment

Kylie Jenner is being sued by a former housekeeper who claims she was harassed and discriminated against while working for the makeup mogul.

Angelica Hernandez Vasquez filed a lawsuit against Kylie Jenner Inc., Tri Star Services and La Maison Family Services on Friday alleging that she was subjected to “severe and pervasive harassment” throughout her employment.

According to court documents obtained by The Times, Vasquez worked for the reality TV star from September 2024 to August 2025, and from her first day on staff at Jenner’s Hidden Hills residence, she was treated with “hostility and exclusion” by the head housekeeper, identified only as Patsy, and another supervisor, identified as Elsi.

Vasquez, who states that she is a Salvadoran woman and practicing Catholic, claims she was routinely assigned the more unsavory tasks involved in housekeeping and excluded from the housekeeping team. According to the suit, she was humiliated by fellow staff members and belittled due to her race, country of origin, religion and immigration status.

The former housekeeper for Jenner further claims that she was mocked for her accent and degraded. She claims that supervisors snapped their fingers while shouting at her, demanded to inspect her phone, made statements including “Catholics are horrible people,” and forced her to perform other staff members’ duties.

According to the court documents, Vasquez reported the mistreatment after Thanksgiving 2024, and in response, the harassment escalated. She also alleges that her scheduled hours were reduced. When Vasquez complained again in March 2025, she claims that a supervisor threw hangers at her feet and threatened her.

Although the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star was not personally accused of bullying behavior in the filing, Vasquez alleges that the defendants failed to pay her in full, paid her late, failed to pay overtime wages, and failed to reimburse business expenses, among other claims.

Vazquez is seeking damages “in the form of unpaid wages, meal and rest period premium pay, unreimbursed business expenses, unpaid sick leave, and all other compensation unlawfully withheld.”

Representatives for Jenner have not yet responded to The Times’ request for comment.

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FBI Director Kash Patel sues the Atlantic over article alleging he drinks excessively

FBI Director Kash Patel sued the Atlantic magazine for $250 million on Monday, claiming an article that talked about his alleged excessive drinking was false and a “malicious hit piece.”

The Atlantic, in response, said it stood by its reporting and would vigorously defend against the “meritless lawsuit.”

In the article, posted on the magazine’s website on Friday, author Sarah Fitzpatrick said Patel is deeply concerned about losing his job and that “he has good reasons to think so — including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking.”

His behavior, including “both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences,” has alarmed officials at the FBI and Department of Justice, the Atlantic said. Fitzpatrick was named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Patel, in the lawsuit filed in district court in Washington, denied the allegations of his behavior and criticized the magazine for relying on anonymous sources. Fitzpatrick wrote that she interviewed more than two dozen people and granted them anonymity to “discuss sensitive information and private conversations.”

“Defendants cannot evade responsibility for their malicious lies by hiding behind sham sources,” the lawsuit said.

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.

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California senator sues Sacramento, alleging ‘retaliatory’ DUI arrest

A California state senator alleges that police officers fabricated evidence to falsely accuse her of driving under the influence after she was T-boned at an intersection near the state Capitol.

Their motive, she claims, was discriminatory bias and a piece of legislation she wrote that law enforcement agencies did not like.

Now, she is suing the city of Sacramento alleging “a deliberate and unlawful campaign to falsely accuse, arrest, and discredit her.”

On Monday, state Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) filed a federal lawsuit against the city as well as the police officers who cited her for driving under the influence in May. The Sacramento district attorney’s office declined to file charges after a blood test showed there were no traces of drugs or alcohol in her system.

Cervantes accuses officers of pushing forward with an arrest despite lacking probable cause and building a case against her based on false statements. She said officers submitted false information to the DMV, forcing her to retain a lawyer to stop her license from being suspended or revoked, according to the complaint.

The Riverside County legislator alleges that this conduct was in retaliation for a bill she authored seeking to restrict how law enforcement agencies store and use data from automatic license plate readers. She claims that officers discriminated against her as an LGBTQ Latina woman and provided more respectful treatment to the white woman who was at fault in the crash.

Cervantes further alleges that unknown parties within the Sacramento Police Department leaked news of her arrest to the press in a deliberate attempt to tarnish her reputation. Representatives for both the city and the Police Department said Monday that they were unable to comment on pending litigation.

“This case is about the abuse of power,” Cervantes’ attorney James Quadra said in a statement Monday. “Officers ignored the facts, fabricated evidence, and tried to turn a victim into a criminal.”

In September, Cervantes filed a government claim against the city, a necessary precursor to taking further legal action. Her lawsuit, filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of California, seeks damages for violations of federal civil rights and state law, including false arrest, unlawful search and seizure, and defamation.

The crash took place at 12:55 p.m. on May 19, 2025, when Cervantes’ car was hit by a driver who failed to yield to the right of way at an intersection in downtown Sacramento. The state senator was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment where officers met and interviewed her for hours, according to the complaint.

The complaint alleges that “despite clear damage to the vehicles showing that the other driver, a young white woman, had t-boned Senator Cervantes’ vehicle” the responding officer “treated the at-fault driver with a deference and respect which was not accorded to Senator Cervantes.”

At the hospital, one of the officers requested that Cervantes submit to a “subjective sobriety test” that included measuring her eye’s response to stimuli, according to the complaint. Cervantes said she was troubled by this request given that she broke no traffic laws and was the victim of a dangerous driver.

In order to obtain a warrant to obtain a blood draw, the officer “falsely claimed that Senator Cervantes had an unsteady gait, slurred speech, and an appearance of drowsiness,” the complaint alleges.

After news of the crash became public, a spokesperson for the Sacramento Police Department told reporters that “based on the objective signs, officers believed that Cervantes was under the influence of a central nervous system depressant.” Redacted test results Cervantes chose to share with the media showed she had a near-zero blood alcohol level, and the district attorney declined to file charges later that month.

Her lawsuit accuses parties within the Police Department of falsely telling the media she was driving under the influence “with the intent to harm Senator Cervantes because of her sponsorship of SB Bill 274 and her status as a Latina member of the LGBTQ+ community.”

The bill sought to restrict law enforcement’s use of automatic license plate readers, following concerns that the technology was being used to violate driver’s privacy and that data was being unlawfully shared with agencies outside of the state.

Civil liberty groups such as the ACLU have demanded that California police stop sharing automatic license plate reader data with out-of-state agencies that could use it to prosecute women traveling to seek abortion care.

In June, an investigation by Calmatters found that law enforcement agencies across Southern California, including the Los Angeles Police Department, violated state law by sharing information from automated license plate readers with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Senate Bill 274 passed the state Senate and Assembly but was vetoed in October by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who sided with law enforcement agencies that expressed concerns over how the bill could hinder their ability to solve crimes.

The bill would have limited the lists agencies could use to monitor for certain cars, required enhanced data security and privacy training for officers and mandated that certain data be deleted after 60 days.

In a letter explaining his veto, Newsom wrote that the bill “failed to strike the delicate balance between protecting individual privacy and ensuring public safety.” He noted that, in instances such as cold cases, license plate data are needed to solve crimes beyond a 60-day window.

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3 FBI agents fired after investigating Trump file class action suit alleging ‘retribution campaign’

Three fired FBI agents sued on Tuesday to try to get their jobs back, saying in a class-action lawsuit that they were illegally punished for their participation in an investigation into President Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

The federal lawsuit adds to the mounting list of court challenges to a personnel purge by FBI Director Kash Patel that over the last year has resulted in the ousters of dozens of agents, either because of their involvement in investigations related to Trump or because they were perceived as insufficiently loyal to the Republican president’s agenda.

The lawsuit in federal court in Washington was technically filed on behalf of just three agents but may have much broader implications given that its request for class-action status could open the door for agents fired since the start of the Trump administration to get their jobs back.

The three agents — Michelle Ball, Jamie Garman and Blaire Toleman — were fired last October and November in what they say was a “retribution campaign” targeting them for their work on the investigation into Trump. The agents had between eight and 14 years of “exemplary and unblemished” service in the FBI and expected to spend the remainder of their careers at the bureau but were abruptly fired without cause and without being given a chance to respond, the lawsuit says.

“Serving the American people as FBI agents was the highest honor of our lives,” they said in a statement. “We took an oath to uphold the Constitution, followed the facts wherever they led and never compromised our integrity. Our removal from federal service — without due process and based on a false perception of political bias — is a profound injustice that raises serious concerns about political interference in federal law enforcement.”

Trump’s indictment

The investigation the agents worked on culminated in a 2023 indictment from special counsel Jack Smith that accused Trump of illegally scheming to undo the results of the presidential election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Smith ultimately abandoned that case, along with a separate one accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., after Trump won back the White House in 2024, citing Justice Department legal opinions that prohibit the federal indictments of sitting presidents.

The lawsuit notes that the firings followed the release by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of documents about the election investigation — known as Arctic Frost — that he said had come from within the FBI. Those records included files showing that Smith’s team had subpoenaed several days of phone records of some Republican lawmakers, an investigative step that angered Trump allies inside Congress.

The complaint names as defendants Patel and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, accusing them of having orchestrated the firings despite being “personally embroiled” either as witnesses or attorneys in some of the legal troubles Trump has faced.

Patel, for instance, was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury investigating Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and had his phone records subpoenaed, while Bondi was part of the legal team that represented Trump at his first impeachment trial, which resulted in his acquittal.

“And now, by virtue of presidential appointment to the pinnacle of federal law enforcement, Defendants are abusing their positions to claim victories that eluded them on the merits,” the lawsuit states.

Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. Patel and Bondi have said the fired agents and prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team were responsible for weaponizing federal law enforcement, a claim that was also asserted in their termination letters but that the plaintiffs call defamatory and baseless.

Fired agents call for ‘fundamental constitutional protections’

Dan Eisenberg, a lawyer for the agents, said in a statement that his clients were fired without any investigation, notice of charges or chance to be heard.

“This lawsuit seeks to reaffirm fundamental constitutional protections for FBI employees, ensuring they can perform their duties without fear or favor. We all benefit when law enforcement officers’ only loyalty is to facts and the truth,” said Eisenberg, who is with the firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.

The lawsuit asks for the agents to be reinstated to their positions and for a court declaration affirming that their rights had been violated. It also seeks to represent a class of at least 50 agents who have been terminated since Jan. 20, 2025, or will be. Those agents also stand to recover their jobs in the event the case is successful and the requested class-action status is granted.

Others have been fired too

Other fired employees who have sued include agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in 2020; an agent trainee who displayed an LGBTQ+ flag at his workspace; and a group of senior officials, including the former acting director of the FBI, who were terminated last summer.

The firings have continued, with Patel last month pushing out a group of agents in the Washington field office who had been involved in investigating Trump’s hoarding of classified documents. Trump has insisted he was entitled to keep the documents when he left the White House and has claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

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