A police officer in Aberdeen has sued her department, alleging she has been harassed, passed over for promotions and discriminated against for years because of her military background and gender.
In a lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Monmouth County, Jessica McDougall Marr alleges her superiors and fellow officers have subjected her to “a strong culture of misogyny and anti-military bias” as well as a consistently hostile work environment.
The suit names the police department, the township and the township manager Bryan Russell as defendants.
“She’s so well respected within the military for her service that it’s really even more outrageous and harmful that the police department treats her like she’s incapable and incompetent solely because she’s a woman,” her Chatham-based attorney Gina Mendola Longarzo said by phone Monday. “She should have been promoted on several different occasions. If you line her up against anyone who has been promoted her accomplishments outshine them all. She’s been held back and it’s really unfair.”
Russell said in an email that the township has yet to be served with the suit and declined to comment.
Neither Aberdeen police Chief Matthew Lloyd nor Capt. Craig Hasumann are named as defendants, though both are mentioned prominently in an array of allegations made by Marr in the lawsuit. Neither could be reached by NJ Advance Media on Monday.
Aberdeen Mayor Fred Tagliarini declined to immediately comment when reached by phone Monday, saying he hadn’t yet seen the lawsuit.
In it, Marr alleges she has been mistreated by most of the department for years.
“‘The “old boys club’ within the department has been supported and has thrived from her day of hiring through the current time and Marr has been shunned, abused and subjected to disparate treatment on an almost daily basis,” the complaint says.
In one alleged example of many provided in the 57-page complaint, Marr said she was turned down for a position as a range instructor when the then deputy police chief in Aberdeen told Marr she would not be able to qualify or pass the course and that she “certainly had no knowledge of firearms.”
He made the comment even though Marr held a similar position with the Navy, received a marksmanship award and is a drill instructor in the Monmouth County Police Academy, the suit claimed.
The suit alleges Marr was regularly mocked for her military background — she is a Petty Officer First Class in the United States Navy Reserve and is still part of the Naval Criminal Investigative Services. Other officers and supervisors made comments about her “playing with puddle jumpers” on weekends.
In addition to being denied promotions given to police officers with less experience who are men, the suit alleges Marr has never been moved off the traffic unit despite her stellar record on it and many requests for other assignments. Other officers have failed to provide her backup on traffic stops when she asked for it, and Marr herself is never asked to provide backup for other officers, according to the suit.
In 2019, a sergeant mocked Marr by saying traffic officers are “not real cops” and by using the acronym “OATS” (Officers Against Traffic Safety) to refer to the traffic division.
And while Marr is the senior officer on the police department’s traffic unit she is not called out to investigate fatal crashes, the suit says.
She was also punished by being put on the midnight shift, after spending several months on leave from the police department while recalled to the military in 2019 and 2020, she claimed.
In different instances, Marr alleged other officers suggested in 2016 she was a lesbian. When she told her fellow officers she is married to a man, they allegedly began referring to her as “bipolar.”
Later, in 2018 rumors swirled in the department that she was having sex with other cops, according to the suit. The rumors led a former deputy chief to personally conduct surveillance on her home to see if other officers were leaving it, the suit alleges. She later moved to Manalapan to escape the intrusion.
“Sexist, chauvinistic and anti-military comments and behavior have permeated her entire time in the department,” the suit alleges.
Hired as a police officer in 2014, Marr previously worked as a dispatcher for the department. She is paid annual salary of $130,480, according to state pension records.
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