A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ordered Melanie McDade-Dickens, the former assistant and ex-girlfriend to Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr., to pay $217,404 in sanctions for failing to turn over a series of records relating to her wrongful termination lawsuit against the city.
Judge Lia Martin’s ruling stops short of throwing out the suit, but it does bar McDade-Dickens and her attorneys from introducing new evidence that would support her allegations that Butts had her fired for ending their nearly decade-long affair.
Mira Hashmall, the attorney representing Inglewood, called the court order “decisive” and a potential “death knell” for McDade-Dickens’ case.
“In 2019, Melanie McDade was terminated after evidence showed she forged City documents, falsified payroll records, put a ghost employee on the City payroll, and submitted fraudulent/forged City documents to obtain funding for a home purchase (a federal crime), among other misconduct,” Hashmall said in a statement.
“In the March 2025 sanctions order, the Court found that Melanie McDade committed perjury in sworn declarations and destroyed evidence that would prove the misconduct that led to her employment being terminated by the City.”
Inglewood maintains McDade-Dickens was fired for cause after allegedly persuading a subordinate to co-sign a home loan in exchange for preferential treatment for her son in the city’s first-time-homebuyer program. The city also alleges she altered financial records and lied about a hardship to withdraw money from a retirement account early to cover the mortgage’s down payment.
McDade-Dickens’ attorneys deny she broke any laws and have accused the outside law firm hired by the city to investigate the matter of being biased because it previously donated to Butts’ political campaigns.
The court’s March 5 ruling found that McDade-Dickens’ side failed to “rebut the extensive evidence offered by Defendants,” including that McDade-Dickens may have destroyed evidence relating to the home loan and “perjured” herself in declarations. The sanction covers attorneys’ fees “incurred for work performed by one attorney at a reduced rate as a direct result of Plaintiff’s discovery abuse” and violation of a prior court order, according to the ruling.
David Miller, McDade-Dickens’ attorney, disagreed with the ruling and pledged to appeal the decision.
“The rulings of the Court are totally unrelated to the core issues of the case and have no connection whatsoever to the illegal quid pro quo conduct of Mayor James Butts,” Miller said. “Moreover, the inaccurate conclusions of the Court do not change the fact that Mayor Butts engaged in an extra-marital sexual affair with his subordinate for multiple years and, once Ms. McDade ended that relationship, Mayor Butts used the power of his office to illegally retaliate against her.”
Miller said McDade-Dickens plans to “vigorously pursue her claims against Mayor Butts” and is confident she will prevail at trial.
The court battle between Inglewood and McDade-Dickens has been ongoing since she first filed her case in 2021. The city fired McDade-Dickens, once one of the city’s highest paid employees, in late 2019, roughly a year after she and Butts ended their secret relationship.
She alleges Butts cut her assignments, berated her in front of staff, and harassed and stalked her following their breakup. Other city employees named in the case allegedly either knew, or should have known, about the inappropriate relationship and the harassment, and did nothing to stop it, according to the lawsuit.
In 2021, one of the claims related to sexual harassment was thrown out by a judge because the case was filed late. However, proving sexual harassment is still critical to the overall litigation, as it would support other claims alleging retaliation, the city’s failure to investigate and prevent sexual harassment, negligent supervision and harassment.
McDade-Dickens demanded $65 million to settle the lawsuit in a letter submitted to the city back in August. Her attorneys have argued that the text messages and emails between McDade-Dickens and Butts show “without a slightest doubt” that her employment was conditioned upon submission to his sexual advances.