By Ken Jackson
Staff Writer

Former Osceola County Clerk of Courts Malcom Thompson had the opportunity to face office staffers on Tuesday who he felt “baited” him at a state ethics hearing.

Thompson, joined by his wife, Elizabeth, and attorney Brennan Donnelly, heard testimony from six employees who were present when Thompson made alleged physical contact with administrative aide Latifa Ramdani in the Clerks’ Office that day shortly after Christmas over a year ago. Testimony also spoke about the meeting Thompson, Ramdani and other Clerks’ Office employees had when Thompson reportedly got upset and yelled at the staffers in an aggressive manner.

The Florida Commission on Ethics found, in September, enough probable cause that he violated state laws using his position to “intimidate the Clerk’s Office (and its employees) for personal and political power.”

Thompson opted to participate in the hearing rather than settle with the commission and face a civil penalty. When it ended, he questioned why it even occurred.

“My being here today, I don’t understand it,” he said to reporters on the way out. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Does it make any sense to you?”

Prior to that, Thompson asked the Attorney General’s office to pay his legal fees for the hearing. He has already asked state or local taxpayers to pay the $55,000 tab for fees incurred during criminal trials that came from the incidents in April; he was acquitted on one assault charge, and another battery charge was thrown out of court.

Once the transcript is completed and distributed from Tuesday’s hearing, the defense and the state commission and its lawyer, Melody Hadley, will have 10 days to prepare their recommended orders. Administrative law judge Thomas Crafts will have 20 days to give his findings. The state ethics board will then be able to make a recommendation on the penalty.

In the hearing, Thompson admitted Ramdani had made an accusation, and said the physical contact, after a discussion about Christmas cards Ramdani had on display that Thompson wanted her to take down, was more of a “bump” than a “hit” because of reduced depth perception due to lack of vision in his left eye.

“She said, ‘You hit me!’ then screamed it again,’” Thompson said. “I told her ‘I bumped you,’ and that I apologized and that it wasn’t intentional.”

While away on vacation, Thompson said he received a call from then-Chief Deputy Clerk Kim Hennecy, who had been contacted by the spouse of someone also running in the Clerk of Courts race; later testimony revealed it to be Raylynne Ketchum’s husband, Gary. Raylynne Ketchum lost in the general election Nov. 6 to Armando Ramirez, who was sworn into Thompson’s old job Tuesday while the hearing proceeded.

Once he discovered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had been investigating — and that he wasn’t notified of it — Thompson said he returned from vacation early to “smooth things over.”

He came to the courthouse on Jan. 10, and saw Ramdani in the parking lot. When he approached her to speak on the matter, she said she would not speak to him until reaching the Clerks’ Office on the sixth floor.

A meeting ensued that included Ramdani, Human Resources Manager Kimberlee Zander and other office staffers Peggy Lay and Melissa Benoit.

Accounts of that meeting differ. Thompson accused Lay of “aggressively coming toward him,” at which time he became “irritated and disappointed,” but remained adamant that nobody in the department would lose their job over the incident, and that he was there to simply smooth over the incident with Ramdani.

“I told them, ‘I can’t protect ya’ if I’m not the clerk,” he said.

Zander, who filed one of the criminal charges as well as the ethics complaint, said she had heard about the original incident through Hennecy, but the department couldn’t use normal channels to search for answers.

“HR couldn’t investigate because it was against the boss and the results would be questioned,” she said.

Zander, who left the department late last year, said she interjected into the Jan. 10 meeting over worry about Ramdani’s safety.

“I knew he had a temper, and that he wasn’t supposed to be there,” she said. “Latifa was worried he was going to fire us all.”

Thompson then jumped at Zander with a raised voice and said, “Don’t raise your voice to me.” Zander said Ramdani told him to “put his hands in his pockets and sit down.”

When Zander told him, “I didn’t raise my voice,” she said he got up again and approached her.

“I thought he was going to hit me,” she said, noting that later in the meeting Thompson asked everybody in the room if they were scared of him.

“They all said they were,” Zander said. “I thought he was a great clerk, in the beginning. That changed with the incident with Latifa.”

In her testimony, Ramdani, who asked to sit in a chair closer to the judge and farther from Thompson, said he was a good boss, and that she did not want to pursue action on the original incident to avoid the embarrassment and media attention to her family.

“If I wanted to do something about it, I would have done something that day,” she said, and noted that it was Lay who reported the incident to Hennecy.

Ramdani corroborated the details of the Jan. 10 meeting, and that Thompson got angry and approached Zander. Ramdani was moved from the sixth floor Clerks’ office to the Human Resources department on the second floor, but asked to return to the sixth floor because the HR area was “too noisy.”

Thompson said the Jan. 10 meeting began with laughter (“I thought the issue was resolved”), and that he never took punitive action against anyone that later became a witness in one of the cases or campaigned for himself in the upcoming election within the office.

“I know it’s against the law to (do that). It’s my job to run the office,” he said.

“Everything ran smooth for three years. Then in the political year, all this broke down. I later found out I was baited into a trap.”