Jovan Thomas was lounging at home in front of the television on Jan. 26 when, he said, a friend whose father had recently died came to mind. The friend was an old fraternity brother, and Thomas, 56, thought to cheer him up with an off-color message.
“I completed the text; I pressed send,” said Thomas, whose own mother had recently died. “It looked normal to me.”
“What color panties you have on,” he wrote just after 10 a.m. Seconds later, he sent a second message saying he hoped the joke would bring a smile.
Almost immediately, Thomas — then a victims’ advocate in the Victims Services Division of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office — got a call from a colleague and learned that he’d entered the nightmare of every white collar worker. “She said, ‘Jovan, you just emailed the whole office.’ I was like, oh, my God! It was one of those out-of-body experiences,” he said in the first interview he’s given since the incident.
He’d not only sent the missive to everyone at the District Attorney’s Office; it also appeared as though his boss, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, was the intentional recipient.
In the days that followed, Thomas found himself pilloried in the press, his past mistakes dissected. He was accused of having an affair with Jenkins. He lost his job and his purpose.
Seven months later, after feeling doubly wounded by his firing and witnessing the dismantling of his reputation, he filed suit against the city on July 19. Now he’s speaking for the first time about the fateful email and its aftermath.
A couple of hours after the accidental message, Thomas sent another all-staff email.
“Good afternoon everyone,” he wrote. “While texting back and forth with my fraternity brother I sent a very inappropriate email. I sincerely apologize to everyone. Please know this is not who I am as a person as I carry myself with respect and dignity.”
‘I made a horrible mistake. It’s a mistake that you can be fired for.’
Jovan Thomas
Hoping for forgiveness and for the matter to be handled privately, Thomas received the opposite treatment: Soon after sending, the emails landed on X. The District Attorney’s Office went into damage control mode, quickly distancing itself from Thomas, issuing statements clarifying that Jenkins had no intimate relationship with him and calling the emails violations of its code of conduct and “misogynistic behavior.”
“It’s not true,” he said of the DA office’s characterization of him. “I don’t carry myself like that. I have people who look up to me.”
After the emails went public, Thomas sent Jenkins a text, hoping to explain that the message was an honest mistake. He told The Standard he had only a professional relationship with the DA.
Before the day was out, the office told Thomas he’d been let go. “I was mad at myself. How could I be so careless?” he said. But he had some relief knowing he’d been laid off without cause, which meant he might still be able to work. Thomas recalled the head of human resources reassuring him: “He said this comes with no discipline.”
There was no investigation or inquiry into what happened, as far as Thomas knew. But days later, he said, the office sent him paperwork saying he had, in fact, been fired for cause.
“I made a horrible mistake. It’s a mistake that you can be fired for,” said Thomas. While he accepts responsibility, he said he didn’t deserve to have his name dragged through the mud by his former employer.
Thomas contends that the fallout has made it nearly impossible for him to find work, which is part of the reason he filed a defamation lawsuit against the city.
“If it would have stayed in-house, I would be OK,” he said, speculating that once the incident became public, there was no chance of keeping his job. “People knew it was a mistake.”
The District Attorney’s Office declined to comment and referred the matter to the City Attorney’s Office, whose spokesperson said it hasn’t been served and will respond in court.
‘We’ve joked around in the past’
Thomas, along with his fraternity brother and lawyer, met with The Standard last Thursday to tell his side of the story. While this is the first time he’s spoken publicly about the incident, he never clearly explained how he accidentally sent an email to his office instead of a text to his friend.
“We’ve joked around in the past, saying things off-color,” said his friend, who asked not to have his name used out of concern for his reputation and career.
Thomas said facing his mistake was bad enough, but having his former employer publicly characterize him as a misogynist with a history of harassing women was worse.
However, his situation is complicated by a previous lawsuit against him.
A few days after the email incident went public in January, The Standard wrote about a 2018 lawsuit filed against Thomas and the city by a woman who had been assigned to him as her advocate after she and her son were victims of gang violence and a robbery. The suit, which did not name the woman, claims that Thomas took advantage of her sexually and later called and texted her repeatedly.
The case died after a judge ruled in favor of a summary judgment filed by the city, arguing that the government was not liable for Thomas’s alleged conduct because it “was not in the course and scope of his employment.” By then, the plaintiff agreed to remove Thomas’ name from the complaint.
Speaking with The Standard, Thomas denied the allegations of the lawsuit and said he was cleared in that case. Reached for comment, his attorney Michael Lieberman wrote in an email, “Jane Doe’s allegations that [Thomas] acted inappropriately with her are absolutely false.”
‘No one who received plaintiff’s email could reasonably have believed that plaintiff had actually inquired of his boss, the District Attorney of San Francisco, what color panties she was wearing.’
Jovan Thomas’ attorney Michael Lieberman
Thomas repeated to The Standard that he’s not a misogynist and that the accusations made against him by the District Attorney’s Office are untrue.
“I don’t hate women. I have six sisters, man. I’m the only boy,” he said.
In the lawsuit against the office, Thomas claims that the email was not intended harassment, nor did he want to blow up his career.
“Absolutely no one who received plaintiff’s email could reasonably have believed that plaintiff had actually inquired of his boss, the District Attorney of San Francisco, what color panties she was wearing, either seriously or as a joke, much less in an email sent to the entire staff at defendant SFDA,” wrote Lieberman in the suit.
From the streets to the DA’s office
At times teary-eyed during the half-hour interview with The Standard, Thomas lamented that one email destroyed the years he had spent building something he was proud of.
Raised in the Bayview, Thomas spent time in juvenile hall and the criminal justice system after selling drugs as a kid. He began making a life for himself after graduating at 18 from Omega Boy’s Club, a Bayview-based youth development and violence-prevention organization.
Thomas attended Morris Brown College in Georgia, then returned to California and worked for 12 years as a flight attendant for Delta and United Airlines.
In 2012, he began working for San Francisco’s Child Protective Services. After a three-year stint there, Thomas was recruited by the District Attorney’s Office to join its Victims Services Division as a victims’ advocate. He worked in various capacities until he was posted to the unit’s homicide section. Most of his time was spent in a satellite office in Bayview, where he rarely saw anyone from the main office, he said.
Thomas’ job often entailed meeting with the families of homicide victims: helping them apply for state funds for funeral services, getting them set up with grief counseling or keeping them updated on the status of their cases.
Now, he is collecting unemployment as he tries to clear his name in court.
“I went from the jailhouse to the schoolhouse to working for the DA,” he said. “That’s something I was proud of.”