A retired NYPD lieutenant who took a $170,000-a-year job as chief investigator for New York City's Department of Probation claims she was terminated the day after she forwarded employee complaints to the city's Department of Investigation, complaints that included an allegation of an intimate relationship between the agency's commissioner and its general counsel.
Ebony Huntley filed suit Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court, alleging whistleblower retaliation and claiming the city owes her $200,000 in unpaid wages from her brief tenure at the agency, the New York Post reported. The lawsuit was first reported by Politico.
At the center of the complaint: Probation Commissioner Sharun Goodwin, a nearly 40-year veteran of the agency whom Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed in late January, and General Counsel Wayne McKenzie, the department's top attorney, whom Goodwin brought back to the agency after her appointment. McKenzie had previously worked at the probation department for 12 years before Goodwin rehired him.
Huntley's lawsuit lays out a swift sequence of events. She says she received a letter signed by "concerned employees" that raised multiple issues about the department's leadership, among them, an allegation that Goodwin and McKenzie had a "prior intimate personal relationship." Huntley says she forwarded the complaints to the Department of Investigation, the city's inspector-general arm.
What happened next, according to the suit, took less than a day.
Just 24 hours after Huntley reached out to DOI, McKenzie summoned her to a remote meeting. The suit alleges he "referenced the anonymous complaint, specifically acknowledging that he was named in it." Then, per the filing, McKenzie told Huntley she was done.
The words attributed to McKenzie in the lawsuit are blunt. He allegedly told Huntley, "I cannot have a person like Ebony working for me," said he was "disappointed," and informed her she was "terminated." When Huntley responded that she was "lost," McKenzie allegedly replied: "you may be lost but you can't work for me."
For a city employee who says she did nothing more than pass along a complaint to the agency designed to receive exactly that kind of complaint, the timeline raises hard questions. Ethical questions surrounding Mayor Mamdani's inner circle are not new, but the speed of the alleged retaliation here, one day, is striking even by City Hall standards.
John Scola, Huntley's attorney, framed the case in terms that should resonate with anyone who thinks government employees ought to be able to report misconduct without losing their jobs.
"No employee should be terminated for forwarding complaints they received to the City's Department of Investigation."
Scola went further, saying he expects the Mamdani administration to respond with accountability, not just for the alleged retaliation, but for the underlying conduct that prompted the complaint in the first place.
"We expect the Mamdani administration to take swift disciplinary action against those responsible and rectify my client's unlawful termination."
Whether the administration will act swiftly, or at all, remains an open question. Mayor Mamdani, speaking at an unrelated press conference on Friday, confirmed only that "there is an investigation." He declined to comment more specifically on Huntley's claims.
Mamdani did offer a general assurance. "I take any allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously," he said. The mayor did not say which agency is conducting the investigation or what its scope might be.
The allegations land at a difficult moment for an administration already facing scrutiny on multiple fronts. Mamdani has drawn criticism for everything from the loss of thousands of businesses under his watch to questions about how his office manages city resources.
The Department of Probation, which supervises tens of thousands of people on probation across the five boroughs, is not an agency that can afford leadership chaos. Goodwin's appointment was supposed to bring stability, she had spent nearly four decades inside the department before Mamdani elevated her. Instead, her first months as commissioner have produced a lawsuit alleging that she installed a former intimate partner as the agency's top lawyer and that the pair then fired the person who flagged the arrangement.
If the lawsuit's account is accurate, the message sent to every rank-and-file employee at the Department of Probation is unmistakable: report misconduct at the top, and you're out.
That is the opposite of how whistleblower protections are supposed to work. New York City maintains an entire agency, the Department of Investigation, for the express purpose of receiving and investigating complaints about city employees and officials. Employees are encouraged, and in some cases required, to report suspected wrongdoing. The system depends on people like Huntley being willing to come forward.
Firing someone the day after she contacts DOI doesn't just punish one whistleblower. It poisons the well for every city worker who might consider doing the right thing in the future. Mamdani has already faced criticism for the gap between his public commitments and the way his administration actually operates. This lawsuit widens that gap considerably.
A lawsuit is an allegation, not a verdict. Huntley's claims have not been tested in court. Goodwin and McKenzie have not had a chance to respond formally to the specific allegations. The city has not commented beyond the mayor's brief remarks.
But the facts Huntley puts forward are specific and sequenced. She names the complaint letter. She names the people involved. She identifies the timeline down to the hour. And she claims $200,000 in unpaid wages on top of the retaliation claim, suggesting her separation from the agency may have been handled irregularly in more ways than one.
The $170,000 salary Huntley earned as chief investigator is not trivial. Taxpayers fund that position. They also fund the commissioner's office, the general counsel's office, and the Department of Investigation that is now apparently looking into the matter. If Goodwin and McKenzie used their authority to punish an employee for doing exactly what city policy tells employees to do, that is a misuse of public trust, paid for with public money.
The mayor's administration is already contending with a $12 billion budget deficit and the management headaches that come with it. Adding a whistleblower retaliation scandal at a major agency does nothing to inspire confidence that City Hall has its house in order.
Mamdani picked Goodwin. Goodwin brought in McKenzie. McKenzie, according to the lawsuit, fired Huntley. The chain of responsibility is short and direct.
If the investigation the mayor referenced on Friday confirms even the basic outline of Huntley's claims, that she was terminated the day after contacting DOI about leadership complaints, then "taking allegations seriously" will require more than a press-conference platitude. It will require consequences for the people who made the call.
Scola, Huntley's lawyer, has already put the administration on notice. The question now is whether Mamdani's team treats this as a genuine accountability moment or as a political problem to manage quietly. Ethics scandals in government have a way of festering when leaders choose damage control over transparency.
A city that fires its watchdogs for watching isn't serious about clean government. It's serious about protecting the people in charge.