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The latest evidence of dysfunction at the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries under former agency head and now U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.): A director whom Hoyle hired in 2020 was investigated this spring and later forced out for talking with agency employees about stalking a former subordinate and discussing how she would commit a murder.
BOLI is the state agency that fields and investigates complaints made by workers against their employers; in this case, ironically, BOLI had to hire an outside firm to investigate one of its own top directors.
WHO LOST HER JOB
Lisa Ransom, director of the Oregon Apprenticeship and Training Division at BOLI, was placed on leave this spring after several employees came forward with allegations that Ransom made remarks that implied violence.
A Portland law firm hired by BOLI to investigate the allegations substantiated most of them in a July 24 report, obtained by WW through a public records request.
The law firm interviewed eight witnesses during its investigation. Several witnesses alleged Ransom told them she would wait in the bushes outside of a former employee’s apartment; and one witness reported that Ransom remarked that if she ever committed murder, she would do it in a scuba suit. (Witnesses say they were unclear whether she was speaking in jest.)
A separation agreement signed by Ransom and the agency on Aug. 18 show that Ransom’s last paid day is Nov. 1, but the agency declined to comment further. BOLI also removed Ransom from the state’s Workforce Talent Development Board, an advisory board to state leaders, after launching the investigation.
Hoyle’s leadership of BOLI has been under scrutiny after WW reported on her role in supporting a half-million-dollar apprenticeship grant to a nonprofit helmed by the co-founder of La Mota, a major campaign donor to top Oregon Democrats.
WHAT RECORDS SHOW
The current BOLI administration launched the investigation after Ransom’s colleagues complained she had “used language that implied violence” on multiple occasions.
The report, prepared by the Portland law firm Klein Munsinger, found that Ransom violated state policies on maintaining a professional, violence-free, and discrimination- and harassment-free workplace. Investigators interviewed eight witnesses within the agency.
Two sets of remarks that Ransom allegedly made stand out in the 20-page report.
First, according to more than half the witnesses, Ransom repeatedly discussed a former employee whom she strongly disliked. She allegedly told three witnesses, on three separate occasions, that she imagined hiding in the bushes outside the woman’s apartment. (The witnesses said it was unclear whether Ransom was speaking this in jest or had even carried out the scenario she described, but the witnesses felt fearful or threatened regardless.)
Ransom allegedly told one of the witnesses that she ran by the woman’s house at night and waited for her and her dog to come out. “I’m a Marine, and I deal with things directly,” Ransom allegedly said. (Ransom is indeed a former U.S. Marine. She then worked for a decade as a program coordinator for a company that helps veterans get construction jobs.)
Another witness said Ransom recounted going to the woman’s apartment: “I’m in the bushes, looking for her in her apartment, looking for her black poodle.”
A second witness described the same story. “Strikingly, both Witness 8 and Witness 5 made the same pantomiming gesture—a furtive head bob—of a person peering through bushes when quoting Director Ransom,” investigators wrote.
A second set of remarks that lawyers investigated for the report involved three witnesses recalling that Ransom would call the former employee, whose hair was dyed, a “skittlehead” or a “skittle-headed heifer.” (“Heifer,” the report says, is a derogatory slang word used against women.)
After Ransom brought up hiding in the woman’s bushes, one witness said Ransom told her: “I think I could kill a person. I think I could kill someone. I think about it, and I know how I would do it. I would wear a scuba suit if I did that.’ Director Ransom went on to say she was into true crime in the past.’”
WHAT RANSOM SAYS
Ransom tells WW she did make the bushes and scuba suit comments, but says they were taken wildly out of context, and that various expressions she used—like hiding in the bushes and the term “heifer”—were not insults, but cultural expressions she’s used for many years.
Ransom tells WW: “From a Southern cultural respect, which is where my ancestors are from, slavers used a negative connotation to degrade us and call us heifers, whores, sows. So we flipped it to where we made it into a positive.”
She told investigators the scuba suit idea came from a cousin “as a means to commit the perfect crime.” Ransom tells WW it originated from a family conversation at Thanksgiving about a Netflix series on Jeffrey Dahmer that dominated the cultural zeitgeist last fall.
Ransom conceded that “skittlehead” was meant as an insult. But she says the larger issue is that colleagues whose careers she nurtured took her remarks out of context and turned them on her.
“They want to characterize me as this angry, violent Black woman with homicidal ideologies and stalking someone?” Ransom said in a phone interview. “I will never know why these women that I loved, respected, that told me how life-changing my mentorship was, would choose to gather off-context [comments] and try to build something to damage my character.”
Ransom calls the report “one-sided” and “disappointing,” and adds she feels betrayed by her colleagues—white women who she says coordinated their actions to end her career in state government. “It was just the culmination of my experience being a Black woman in Portland,” Ransom says. “The culture of BOLI, it’s a firecracker for white fragility.”
Clarification: A previous version of this story said Ransom was fired. Ransom maintains she resigned. (Separation agreements are often used by employers as a tool to oust an employee they intend to fire.)