A nonprofit director accused of improperly billing the city for luxury and personal expenses is suing the organization she led, claiming it skimped on her wages as she was shown the door.
SF SAFE, the nonprofit arm of the San Francisco Police Department, fired Kyra Worthy as executive director in January 2024 after a city investigation found the charity had misused public money on luxury gift boxes, valet parking at an exclusive club, and limo services during a Lake Tahoe trip.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, Worthy claims she is owed $26,192 in unpaid wages and vacation time, alleging she never received her final paycheck.
Worthy claims she learned of her firing when a reporter from The Standard emailed her Jan. 24, 2024, for “request for comment on your termination.” To this day, Worthy claims she never received official notice of her dismissal.
The fallout from the scandal caused her “emotional distress, including anxiety, insomnia, and depression,” the lawsuit alleges.
The scandal broke after the city controller released a scathing report detailing financial misconduct within SF SAFE, short for “Safety Awareness for Everyone,” alleging that staff had used public money to take a $15,000 trip to Lake Tahoe.
Contractors subsequently emerged to allege the nonprofit owed them large sums of money. The SFPD was found to have given SF SAFE between $3.8 million and $5.3 million without checking receipts, leading the controller’s office to claim that the amount of mispent money was “likely significantly higher.”
Following the controller’s report, the nonprofit temporarily shut down and Worthy was fired. Additionally, the SF SAFE board discovered signs of check forgery as the organization’s bank accounts were running dry, President Dan Lawson told The Standard at the time.
Then more allegations came to light. In July 2024, the district attorney’s office charged Worthy with 34 felonies related to the misuse of more than $700,000 in public funds. According to prosecutors, Worthy poured more than $350,000 into luxury gift boxes in 2022 and 2023 and nearly $100,000 on a single event dubbed “Candy Explosion” in October 2023.
Earlier, in 2018, Worthy allegedly used three cashier’s checks from the nonprofit to cover $8,000 in rent payments, disguising the expense to accountants as community programming. Court filings further accuse her of spending more than $90,000 in nonprofit funds in 2019 and 2020 on a home healthcare aide for her parents in North Carolina.
Prosecutors also allege that between September 2023 and January 2024, Worthy stopped paying payroll taxes for 27 employees, even as she continued issuing paychecks that led staff to believe the taxes were being covered.
The SFPD didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The city attorney’s office declined to comment as Worthy was not employed by the city. Attempts to reach SF SAFE for comment were unsuccessful.