Lisa Tresslar is a highly regarded attorney who was tapped by former Judge Steve Baratta to overhaul custody cases in Northampton County. At that time, custody cases were a mess. Part-time masters were unable to work out settlements with which parents were satisfied, and the result was a deluge of non-jury trials every month. Within a matter of months, Tresslar was able to convince most parties to agree on custody disputes, reminding them time and again that their primary goal should be what is best for their children.Tresslar herself was a successful Wall Street lawyer, but her own custody dispute made her realize just how important these cases are to mothers, fathers and most importantly, their children. She worked with parties, often beyond the hour slotted for a case, to ensure a just resolution.
She did the work of three part-time custody masters once employed by the court. Her greatest gift was her ability to listen, but in truth, she should be a judge herself. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as Executive Editor of its prestigious law review. That's pretty incredible for a conservative from Arkansas. Among the students she edited was Sonia Sotomayor Elena Kagan, who now is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
We were incredibly fortunate to have her serving Northampton County courts. But she may have done her job just a little too well.
Below is her resignation letter. It's lengthy, but it's a quick read. She is claiming that Judges Jennifer Sletvold and Paula Roscioli, along with Court Administrator Jermaine Greene, created a hostile work environment under which she finds it impossible to continue the outstanding work she has done.
I am shocked by the petty behavior from people who apparently are willing to sacrifice the best interests of our children to satisfy some petty jealousy.
I am writing to submit my resignation as custody master. In numerous previous memoranda, I have detailed harassing and bullying behavior by Judge Jennifer R. Sletvold, Judge Paula A. Roscioli, and Court Administrator J. Jermaine Greene, Sr. The three of them are demonstrably motivated by age and sex discrimination. They are threatened by, and hostile toward, any woman who is talented, hardworking, and has earned the respect of judges, attorneys, and other opinion leaders in the community. They have created a hostile work environment in the courthouse, not only for me but for many other older women. Although I have never done anything to any of them, they have been so threatened by me that they have become obsessed with destroying me. They have been trying to drive me out of the courthouse for the past five years. They have waged an unrelenting campaign to limit my role and destroy my value to the court. They have defamed me, publicly humiliated me, and made every effort to make me appear incompetent. Because I stood my ground, and because they could not persuade the two past President Judges to fire me, they began actively sabotaging the Custody Division, hoping to destroy its magnificent operations and use that as a basis for saying I had lost my effectiveness. When you became President Judge five months ago, in May 2023, you immediately endorsed their agenda, adopted the new custody procedures they had requested, and placed Mr. Greene in charge of all administrative functions of the Custody Division, demoting me into oblivion. Mr. Greene has now deliberately plunged the Custody Division into complete disarray. He has violated our longstanding procedures and even the procedures you yourself recently adopted. If he is allowed to continue, the court will soon be in violation of the State Rules of Civil Procedure, and the custody court will no longer be a realistic resource for the children and families of Northampton County.
I have worked for almost forty years to develop my professional expertise and establish relationships with judges and attorneys. I cannot allow these people to inflict further damage on my professional reputation. My working conditions have become intolerable. No reasonable person could be expected to continue working in such an environment. Although you have not fired me, your knowing indulgence of the actions taken against me constitutes constructive termination. I am therefore compelled to resign.
I. The Custody Court Under President Judge Baratta
In 2014, nine years ago, there was no custody office. The court was drowning in custody cases, and they seriously hampered the operations of the entire court. The daily proceedings in Motions Court were swamped with custody disputes, both large and small. On each week's Miscellaneous Hearing List, every judge was assigned multiple custody cases. On the monthly Non-Jury Trial Lists, there were typically as many as fifty to seventy custody cases, an impossible number.
In 2014, then-President Judge Stephen G. Baratta completely overhauled the custody court. He created the position of full-time custody master and hired me to fill that role. He placed me in charge of all administrative functions of the custody court, reporting directly to him. The judges and attorneys responded well to the new procedures we implemented, and they began to make great use of the custody office.
As a result of Judge Baratta's overhaul of the custody court and implementation of our new custody procedures, we were able to reduce the number of custody filings by twenty-five percent. Previous custody masters had settled approximately thirty percent of their cases. By contrast, I settled approximately eighty-five percent of my cases. The number of custody petitions presented at the daily proceedings in Motions Court and on the weekly Miscellaneous Hearing Lists slowed to a trickle. Even when cases failed to settle and moved forward to trial, I continued working to settle them. Thus, of the fifteen percent of cases that did not settle at the initial conference with me, more than half settled between the time of the conference and the time of trial. At the start of a typical Non-Jury Trial week, instead of having fifty to seventy custody cases on the list, now there typically would be only five to fifteen cases. Most of those cases were so well prepared, and so thoroughly documented in my written case summaries, that the judges were able to settle them without conducting a trial, eliminating the need for generating expensive transcripts and performing time-consuming analyses and written judicial opinions. In short, the new system, which Judge Baratta envisioned and I designed and implemented, ran beautifully.
II. The Custody Court Under President Judge Koury
When Judge Michael J. Koury, Jr. became President Judge in 2018, he maintained the custody procedures that Judge Baratta had established during his administration. In addition, President Judge Koury created a formal Custody Division of the court. He appointed Judge Sletvold to serve as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division. As I have outlined extensively in previous memoranda, from the very beginning of her tenure as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division, Judge Sletvold was inexplicably threatened by me. She was determined to limit my authority and my value to the other judges. She went so far as to prohibit me from even speaking to the other judges, an order that was contrary to my years of practice and that President Judge Koury quickly overruled. When Judge Sletvold's efforts to restrict my role failed, she demanded that President Judge Koury fire me. President Judge Koury refused. He advised her that he and the other judges greatly valued the role I played at the court and that if she could not work with me, he would appoint a different judge to oversee the Custody Division.
Judge Sletvold repeatedly refused to accept President Judge Koury's directives about how I was to perform my job. She would not cease her obsessive efforts to have me fired. Thus, after only one year, President Judge Koury removed Judge Sletvold from her position as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division. He told me that I would never again be required to speak to her. In the four years since then, I have not spoken to her.
After President Judge Koury removed Judge Sletvold as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division, he appointed Judge Baratta to replace her. Judge Baratta resumed his prior control of the custody court, and he continued to run it very successfully until January 2022, when he stepped down. At that time, President Judge Koury appointed Judge John M. Morganelli to succeed him as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division.
Even after Judge Sletvold was removed as my boss and forbidden to speak to me, she continued to wage an unrelenting campaign of attacks against me. She enlisted the support of Judge Roscioli and Court Administrator Greene, both of whom were also threatened by me, for reasons I have never been able to decipher. Over the past five years, the three of them have never stopped prosecuting their personal vendetta against me.
III. Your Decision To Demote Me When You Became President Judge
When you succeeded Judge Koury as President Judge of the Court in May 2023, you immediately endorsed the agenda of Judges Sletvold and Roscioli and allowed Court Administrator Greene to take control of the administrative functions of the Custody Division. Mr. Greene immediately stripped me of my duties, responsibilities, and authority. Although Mr. Greene was not an attorney and had no idea how the custody office functioned, he insulted my competence and professionalism, telling me that I was ineffective at my job. He hired a part-time master, Roseann Joseph, who had been selected by Judges Sletvold and Roscioli. He downgraded my status below that of the part-time custody master, assigning her the more important cases, giving her exclusive control over our two staff assistants, and forcing me to begin performing my own clerical work. He identified all of the things I did that made me valuable to the judges, and ordered me to stop doing them. For example, he told me that if judges called me for helpwith their hearings or trials when I was holding a custody conference, I was to refuse their requests and tell them I could not interrupt my conference because I was not permitted to alter my conference schedule. He told me that if a case did not settle within its allotted one-hour time slot, I was to abandon the case, list it for trial, and move on to the next case. He told me that I must cease my practice of working at night and on weekends to settle cases and assist judges with drafting their custody orders. He said that my working long hours only proved that I had a "time-management problem." Mr. Greene's directives were transparent efforts to fulfill Judge Sletvold's and Judge Roscioli's longtime goal of restricting my role, diminishing my value to the other judges, making me appear lazy and incompetent, thereby making it easier to terminate me.
IV. Mr. Greene's Efforts To Sabotage the Custody Division
One month ago, on September 11, 2023, Mr. Greene fired Susan Stametz, our most valuable staff assistant, for no legitimate reason. Although Ms. Stametz was an exceptional employee and was vital to the functioning of the Custody Division, Mr. Greene did not replace her and has made no effort to do so. In the month since then, he has assigned no one to perform most of the one-hundred-plus tasks that Ms. Stametz previously performed on a weekly basis. He has deliberately left her email account and telephone number active but has refused to review her incoming emails and telephone messages, leading parties and attorneys to believe that she still works for the County but is simply refusing to respond to their urgent requests. These tactics have not only made Ms. Stametz and me appear incompetent and unprofessional, they have also created staggering problems for parties, attorneys, and judges.
Our one remaining staff assistant, Lauren Haas, is not performing Ms. Stametz's tasks. She has no time to perform even the most mission-critical tasks of the Custody Division, because Mr. Greene completely changed her job description and now requires her to serve as personal assistant to the part-time custody master, Roseann Joseph. Although no custody master, including me, has ever had a personal assistant (Northampton County does not have the budget for that), Mr. Greene deliberately allowed Master Joseph to monopolize every moment of Ms. Haas's time. Ms. Haas tells me that Master Joseph overloads her with incomprehensible requests, pages her whenever she steps away from her desk to file orders or check out files, and bombards her with phone calls outside regular business hours, even thoughshe is only an hourly-paid worker and does not receive compensation for responding to such calls. Attorneys regularly tell me that Master Joseph berates and insults Ms. Haas in front of parties and attorneys. Ms. Haas is well-liked by the attorneys, and they find this behavior distressing. Ms. Haas is now overwhelmed and unable to handle the demands being placed on her. It is only a matter of time before she leaves the County for a better position where she will not be subjected to such treatment.
V. Your Decision To Reverse Course, Remove Mr. Greene from the Custody Division, and Restore Me To My Former Position
On Wednesday of this week, October 11, 2023, you held a lengthy meeting with Mr. Greene and my immediate superior, Judge Morganelli, Administrative Judge of the Custody Division. At that meeting, Judge Morganelli detailed numerous catastrophic failures that had occurred in the Custody Division after you had allowed Mr. Greene to take over my job responsibilities. Judge Morganelli advised that the Custody Division had descended into chaos under Mr. Greene's direction and was now in free fall.
As it was reported to me by Judge Morganelli, at the end of the meeting, you and Judge Morganelli agreed that allowing Mr. Greene to take over my job responsibilities had been a disaster. You and Judge Morganelli advised Mr. Greene that he would no longer have any authority over the Custody Division and that I would be restored to my former position. After the meeting, Judge Morganelli sent me an email stating: "Effective immediately, with approval of the [President Judge], you shall be charged with the scheduling of all of the custody conferences and assigning them to either yourself or [Master Joseph]. Court Administration will no longer be involved in the day to day operations of the custody division."
VI. Your Reversal of Your Decision To Remove Mr. Greene, Followed By Judge Morganelli's Resignation as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division
The following day, Thursday, October 12, 2023, Judge Morganelli called to tell me that you had reneged on the agreement that you and he had reached the day before. Apparently, you still agreed with Judge Morganelli that removing Mr. Greene from the Custody Division was the right thing to do, but you were now afraid to do so, because Mr. Greene had complained to the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts ("AOPC").
In response, Judge Morganelli immediately submitted his resignation as Administrative Judge of the Custody Division. He pointed out that you had deprived him of decision-making authority and were allowing Mr. Greene, an administrative support employee, to dictate policy and procedure to a judge, which he found unacceptable. He said that your indulgence of Mr. Greene's behavior had now made it impossible for him to administer the Custody Division and save it from certain collapse.
VII. Court Administration's Outrageous Harassment of My Son Jake When He Came to the Courthouse To Collect the Personal Belongings of the Staff Assistant Whom Mr. Greene Had Fired
Yesterday, my 23-year-old son Jake and his friend Bob, the 20-year-old son of Susan Stametz's significant other, came to the courthouse to pick up Ms. Stametz's personal belongings. I had gathered Ms. Stametz's personal items and placed them on the floor in Lauren Haas's office in the custody office suite.
County Executive Lamont McClure has exclusive jurisdiction over the custody office. At Mr. McClure's directive, access to the custody office is controlled by the Sheriff of Northampton County, Rich Johnston, who reports to Mr. McClure. Ms. Haas and I were both taking a vacation day yesterday. Ms. Haas was attending a wedding, and I had an appointment for an important medical procedure in Virginia. Thus, neither of us were going to be present at the courthouse when Jake and Bob came to collect Ms. Stametz's personal items. Accordingly, Ms. Stametz pre-arranged with the Sheriff's Office that Jake and Bob would check in with the Sheriff's deputies when they arrived at the courthouse, that they would use my key to enter Lauren Haas's office to retrieve Susan's personal items, and that they would follow any and all directives of the Sheriff's Office while they were there.
As pre-arranged, when Jake and Bob arrived at the courthouse yesterday, they checked in with the Sheriff's deputies and followed the deputies' instructions. However, when Jake and Bob arrived at the custody office, the part-time custody master, Roseann Joseph, questioned their authority to be there. They explained who they were and why they were there, but Master Joseph was unpersuaded. She went into her office, and a few moments later, Mr. Greene's Deputy Court Administrator, Gina Gibbs, entered the custody office. Ms. Gibbs forcefully told Jake and Bob that they had no right to be there, and she ordered them to leave immediately. Jake explained that he and Bob had received permission from the Sheriff's Office to collect Susan's personal items. Ms. Gibbs told Jake that it was "not the Sheriff's decision to make." She said that Court Administration, not the Sheriff, controlled the custody office. She said that Court Administration would have to ensure that Ms. Stametz, Jake, and Bob were not attempting to improperly remove any court property or court documents from the courthouse.
Ms. Gibbs's contentions were preposterous. First, as noted above, it was unquestionably the County Executive, and, by his authority, the Sheriff, who controlled access to the custody office, not Court Administration. Second, Jake and Bob had followed all appropriate protocols, had politely explained why they were there, and clearly posed no security threat. Third, it was obvious at a glance that the small collection of personal items sitting on the floor of Ms. Haas's office consisted solely of Ms. Stametz's mini refrigerator and microwave, her lamp, her family photos, her potted plants, her holiday decorations, a couple of sweaters, some cough drops, and a few other odds and ends. There was no office equipment, no files, no folders, nor any documents of any kind. Nevertheless, Ms. Gibbs aggressively warned Jake and Bob that they must abandon Ms. Stametz's personal items and vacate the premises immediately.
I do not blame Ms. Gibbs for falsely telling Jake and Bob that the Sheriff had no authority to permit them access to the custody office. Ms. Gibbs only recently started her job, and she was undoubtedly acting on orders from Mr. Greene. Mr. Greene, however, was well aware that the County Executive, not Court Administration, controls the custody office and that Court Administration has no authority to control access to that suite of rooms. Thus, if Mr. Greene advised Ms. Gibbs that the Sheriff had no authority to grant access to the custody office, Mr. Greene was lying to her.
After Ms. Gibbs evicted Jake and Bob from the custody office, they returned to the Sheriff's Office. County Executive Lamont McClure was made aware of the situation. Mr. McClure then directed Rich Johnston, Sheriff of Northampton County, to send two armed deputies to escort Jake and Bob back to the custody office. Mr. McClure and Sheriff Johnston directed the deputies to take any action they deemed necessary to ensure that the boys were permitted to remove Ms. Stametz's personal belongings from the courthouse. Mr. McClure specifically directed that the deputies were to take no orders from the Office of Court Administration.
When the two armed deputies escorted Jake and Bob back to the custody office, Custody Master Roseann Joseph again questioned their authority to be there. The deputies advised Master Joseph that they had arranged for someone from Court Administration to observe Jake's and Bob's removal of Ms. Stametz's personal items. Shortly thereafter, two employees from Court Administration (not Ms. Gibbs) arrived to observe. Within approximately one minute, the two employees agreed with Jake and Bob that none of Ms. Stametz's personal items were court property. The deputies stayed to ensure that Jake and Bob were able to take Ms. Stametz's belongings out to their vehicle.
This episode was utterly absurd and an embarrassment to the court. Mr. Greene obviously had no genuine concern that Ms. Stametz was trying to steal court property or court documents. He was simply harassing these two innocent boys as a way to continue harassing Ms. Stametz and me, in obvious retaliation against us for the serious and well-founded complaints we had made about him. More disturbing, Mr. Greene knew that these two unsuspecting boys would have no way of knowing that Ms. Gibbs's statements about Court Administration's asserted jurisdiction over the custody office were false. Mr. Greene knew that the boys would be defenseless against his bullying tactics. Jake and Bob were fortunate that County Executive Lamont McClure intervened in the situation and ordered Sheriff Johnston to overrule Mr. Greene.
This entire episode was embarrassing and shameful. The fact that Mr. Greene would stage a hostile confrontation with the Sheriff's Office over a few house plants and some family photos is simply one more indication that Mr. Greene will stop at nothing to prosecute his vendetta against me.
VIII. My Inability To Continue Performing My Job
Like Judge Morganelli, I find that Mr. Greene's interference in the custody office has made it impossible for me to continue performing my job. Mr. Greene has stripped me of my duties, responsibilities, and authority. He has downgraded my status below that of the part-time custody master. He has fired my most valuable assistant, for no legitimate reason. My one remaining assistant is now completely overwhelmed and unable to perform her duties. Almost all of the administrative functions of the Custody Division, including many that are mission-critical, have now fallen by the wayside and are no longer being performed by anyone.
I am now forced to spend much of my time doing clerical work instead of my own job, settling custody cases. I also spend a great deal of time addressing the neverending barrage of complaints I receive from parties and attorneys about Mr. Greene's inexcusable failures. Many of the parties and attorneys lodging these complaints have complained directly to Mr. Greene, but they tell me that he has simply ignored them and failed to respond.
Judge Morganelli, my boss and longtime colleague, with whom I have always enjoyed an excellent professional relationship, has now resigned. He has told you that Mr. Greene's behavior, and your indulgence of Mr. Greene's behavior, have made it impossible for him to administer the Custody Division. Judge Morganelli is a gifted leader. He has a powerful intellect, incisive judgment, and strong interpersonal skills. If it is impossible for him to do his job, it is certainly impossible for me to do mine.
More important, Mr. Greene has defamed me, publicly humiliated me, and made every effort to make me appear lazy and incompetent. I cannot continue working in an environment that allows Mr. Greene the opportunity to inflict further damage on my professional reputation. No reasonable person could continue working under these conditions. The situation has become intolerable. Although you have not fired me, as noted above, Mr.Greene's actions, and your knowing indulgence of his actions, constituteconstructive termination. Thus, I must resign.
This is my two weeks' notice. However, if you would prefer that I vacate my position sooner, I will comply.
