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In spring 2023, members of the American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Philadelphia-based social justice organization, published a letter renouncing one of their own. It alleged that Raquel Saraswati, its chief equity and inclusion officer who for years had claimed to be a person of Arab, South Asian and Latino descent, was in fact a white woman.
Saraswati, who had often spoken publicly about LGBTQ+ rights, BIPOC empowerment and Islamophobia, denied the allegations. Nonetheless, she resigned from the organization in February as well-regarded local news outlets picked up the story. In February 2023, The Intercept quoted Saraswati’s mother saying that her daughter, who legally changed her last name from Seidel years ago, was “as white as the driven snow.”
Some activists compared Saraswati to Rachel Dolezal, the disgraced former president of the Spokane NAACP chapter who was born to white parents but claimed she was Black.
Saraswati found a place to land after her disgrace: Full Spectrum Therapy, an LGBTQ+ psychotherapy clinic in Portland that focuses on serving low-income trans and nonbinary clients. She handles equity and human resources for the clinic.
The refuge was short-lived. Soon after her hiring, therapists at Full Spectrum found out who she was and raised objections to her hiring in a Sept. 22 email to the clinic’s founder. But Saraswati stayed employed. (By all accounts, Saraswati works remotely from Philadelphia.)
By the beginning of 2024, more than half of the therapists at Full Spectrum had left because of Saraswati’s hiring.
Full Spectrum is one of a handful of clinics in the city that specializes in counseling for trans and nonbinary clients—a type of care that’s in increasingly high demand. In fact, the absence of culturally specific and gender-identity-specific therapy is so pronounced that the Oregon Legislature recently directed $80 million to building up culturally responsive behavioral health providers—$235,000 of it to Full Spectrum.
The exodus from Full Spectrum widened the desert of clinics that work specifically with trans and nonbinary clients.
“There are such limited resources for trans and nonbinary clients who can’t do private pay. That’s what makes this extra painful and heartbreaking for us,” says Kaspar Woods, one of the clinicians who left Full Spectrum in the fall. “It’s heartbreaking to have to bring this level of conflict to a trans person.”
Full Spectrum CEO Sam Skye says that “calling Raquel a danger to clients and staff echoes the anti-Muslim bigotry rampant today. It is very disappointing that any former staff would perpetuate these prejudices.”
Saraswati echoed that in a statement.
“The tropes of a ‘sneaky, conniving, manipulative woman’ and ‘untrustworthy, lying, infiltrating Muslim’ are deeply harmful, discriminatory, and hateful,’” Saraswati said, adding that she won’t resign. “If anything, this has opened the door for me to experience further harassment and harm.”
Skye opened a small therapy practice in Portland in 2017. His aim: to serve a population that’s increasingly seeking therapy but has few places to turn.
More than 90% of Full Spectrum’s clients are on Medicaid. That means the practice serves a population that’s doubly marginalized, both for their gender identity and because they’re low-income. Over the past few years, Skye expanded the clinic to include more than 20 licensed and pre-licensed therapists.
Skye had joined a slice of the therapy market that the Oregon Legislature was trying to build up. Since May 2022, the Oregon Health Authority has provided $350,000 in grants to Full Spectrum, two-thirds of which came from a state program aimed at recruiting and retaining behavioral health providers that serve underrepresented communities.
On Sept. 8, the clinic’s clinical director announced the hiring of a woman named Raquel as the Director of People and Culture. The email did not include Raquel’s last name nor any information about her work experience. That woman was Saraswati.
In a Sept. 18 staff meeting, Saraswati introduced herself. Former clinicians WW spoke to said she made vague reference to a smear campaign she’d endured earlier that year.
That rang a bell for one of the clinicians, who found Saraswati’s backstory in news clips. That clinician told others what they’d found, and word seemed to have circled back to Skye. On Sept. 20, Skye sent the staff a 1,200-word telling of Saraswati’s story, in which Skye painted Saraswati as a victim.
“Raquel shared a laundry list of conspiracy claims she’s suffered, from being accused of having two husbands to wearing a prosthetic nose to being a double agent for a foreign government,” Skye wrote. “She described the events that transpired at her former workplace and the ongoing harassment, death threats, and targeting by groups motivated by their racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic aims.”
Skye called Saraswati a woman of color in his email and said Saraswati’s story was a “tale of leadership, identity, and overcoming adversity.”
Two days later, a handful of clinicians sent an anonymous letter to Skye, demanding that he fire Saraswati immediately.
“The staff of Full Spectrum Therapy assert that [Raquel’s] presence at FST presents a clear and immediate threat to the wellbeing of our clients, our staff, and the Portland community,” they wrote on Sept. 22. “FST staff demand immediate removal of [Raquel] from all responsibilities at FST. …Staff is united in our demands and prepared to stop work to protect ourselves and our clients from further harm.”
Clinicians exchanged worries about Saraswati’s hiring in a September email chain.
One wrote of their concerns, “So even while I can critique and question the social construction of race in America, I am also aware that we need strong opposition to the Rachel Dolezal’s of the world from appropriating the language of gender dysphoria to justify their behavior.”
Later that day, Skye scheduled a Monday Zoom meeting with clinicians about Saraswati. He instructed clinicians not to record the meeting for “legal” reasons.
Skye opened the meeting with a long statement, his voice sounding tired and quivery. He called the anonymous email sent by staff the “antithesis of collective liberation” and said that “veiled threats are not acceptable here.”
One at a time, staff asked Skye questions about Saraswati’s hiring process. He explained he’d hired Saraswati as a contractor in February and then hired her full-time that fall. He’d met Saraswati because she was a friend of the then-chief operating officer at Full Spectrum, Trystan Reese. There was no job posting and no other candidates were considered, Skye said.
“When you have a candidate whose resume is ideal and is also a diverse candidate,” Skye said, “there’s no reason to bring white candidates into the picture.”
To Eli Cuda, a former clinician who left in November, it felt like Skye had been hiding Saraswati. “It felt like we were unwilling participants in this secret,” Cuda says.
By mid-December, at least 10 clinicians had left the practice because of Saraswati’s hiring and Skye’s refusal to fire her. All were trans or nonbinary, and several were people of color.
Quinn Rivenburgh, a licensed therapist who worked at Full Spectrum from 2021 to November 2023 and supervised 12 of the clinic’s pre-licensed clinicians, says Skye instructed them during the height of the Saraswati backlash to “defend the interests of the company.”
“That was a huge red flag for me,” Rivenburgh recalls, “due to the potential to compromise my ethics and responsibilities as a clinical supervisor.”
Rivenburgh was laid off in November after many of their direct reports quit. Some of the clinicians who departed started private practices. Others joined existing clinics. All tell WW they felt Saraswati’s hiring at Full Spectrum had the potential to hurt their vulnerable clients.
Skye called the therapists’ letter “a demonstration of discriminatory harassment, containing falsehoods, lies, libelous statements regarding fraud and theft, and malicious distortions of the truth,” and added that staff turnover is typical while a business is shifting.
Saraswati says she takes her job seriously. “Under no circumstances have I ever compromised confidentiality or put any colleague at risk,” Saraswati said. “This is a problem some have created in order to force an outcome.”
The current staffing level at Full Spectrum is unclear.
Some clinicians say they felt like they abandoned their clients, some of whom were estranged from their families and had formed a deep connection with their therapist.
“The secure attachment that’s formed between a therapist and a client is incredibly healing,” Cuda says. “When it’s disrupted, it’s really disruptive to the client.”