Carranza v. City of Los Angeles

Facts

FEHA prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace, making it unlawful “‘[f]or an employer … because of … sex … to harass an employee.’” (Gov. Code, § 12940, subd. (j)(1); Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at pp. 400–401.) A hostile-work-environment plaintiff must show conduct that was “(1) unwelcome …; (2) because of sex …; and (3) sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of her employment and create an abusive work environment.” (Id. at p. 401, quoting Lyle v. Warner Brothers Television Productions (2006) 38 Cal.4th 264, 279.) In 2019 the Legislature added Government Code section 12923, which declares that the “existence of a hostile work environment depends on the totality of the circumstances” (§ 12923, subd. (c)) and that a hostile environment exists when the conduct “sufficiently offends, humiliates, distresses, or intrudes upon its victim, so as to disrupt the victim’s emotional tranquility in the workplace, affect the victim’s ability to perform the job as usual, or otherwise interfere with and undermine the victim’s personal sense of well-being” (§ 12923, subd. (a)). (Carranza, supra, at pp. 402–403.)

Lillian Carranza held the rank of “Captain III” in the LAPD, “placing her among the top 115 sworn LAPD officers and the top 1 percent of the Department’s 13,000 employees,” and led the commercial crimes division of about 100 employees. (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 393.) In mid-November 2018, while she was on vacation, her attorney told her that “a nude photo resembling her ‘was circulating’ within the LAPD” and sent her a copy — “a closeup of the naked upper torso of a woman pursing her lips with her breasts prominently displayed,” who “was not Carranza” but had “similar facial features.” (Ibid.) Carranza was “very hurt [and] confused” and “[f]elt betrayed, devalued, [and] objectified,” cut short her vacation, and lodged a complaint with MyVoiceLA, an independent City agency. (Ibid.)

On December 22, 2018, Detective Armando Munoz — an officer under Carranza’s command — told her “there was ‘a naked picture of [her] being distributed throughout the city.’” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 394.) He had walked past three uniformed officers, including a supervisor, at Mission Station “looking at a nude photo that Munoz believed depicted Carranza,” overhearing them say, “‘Look at her tits. Oh, look it. I knew she was like this.’” (Id. at p. 395.) Munoz added, “‘I have heard people talking about it … everywhere I go,’” and testified the photo “was a hot subject at the time.” (Ibid.) Carranza believed “‘dozens, if not hundreds’” of officers were passing the photo around. (Ibid.) She emailed Deputy Chief McCarthy asking that the Department inform employees that the photo was not her and that distributing it was misconduct, warning that “‘[s]imply investigating does not stop the action of 100s, if not 1000s, of employees.’” (Ibid.)

Chief Michael Moore testified he believed the photo was intended to “harass, intimidate, … [and] slander” Carranza and “to cause ridicule or embarrassment or harassment of her,” and that sharing it “amounted to misconduct.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 396.) Weighing whether to issue the clarifying communication Carranza requested, Moore concluded the benefit would be to “appease” her but feared “further embarrassment,” questions from “an organization of some 13,000 people,” and disruption of the pending investigation; “[i]n the end, Moore chose not to issue the message,” and “[n]o one ever informed Carranza” of that decision. (Id. at p. 396.) On December 24, Carranza was hospitalized overnight with shortness of breath, palpitations, and high blood pressure. (Ibid.) At trial, the court granted the City’s motion in limine precluding evidence that Carranza had learned of additional viewing incidents at the Staples Center and the Topanga Community Station, so the jury received evidence of her knowledge only through “her initial phone call from Smith and her subsequent conversation with Munoz.” (Id. at pp. 396–397.) Carranza “testified no one ever directly joked about the photo to her, directly harassed her, or made derogatory comments to her.” (Id. at p. 397.) The LAPD’s own August 2019 adjudication sustained her allegation, found the photo had been “circulated throughout the Department,” deemed the conduct “serious misconduct,” yet “did not discipline any employees,” stating it could not identify who was responsible. (Id. at pp. 397–398.)

Procedural history

Carranza filed suit on January 25, 2019, asserting “one cause of action for sexual harassment based on a hostile work environment.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 397.) After a seven-day jury trial in 2022, a special verdict found for Carranza on every element: she was harassed because she is a woman; the harassment was severe or pervasive; a reasonable woman would and Carranza did perceive the environment as hostile; the City knew or should have known and “failed to take immediate corrective action”; and the conduct harmed her. (Id. at pp. 398–399.) “Ten jurors found the harassment severe or pervasive; two did not.” (Id. at p. 399.) The jury awarded “$1.5 million in past … and $2.5 million in future noneconomic damages, for a total of $4 million,” and the court later awarded $610,050 in attorney fees and $31,450 in expert fees. (Id. at p. 399.) The City appealed both the judgment and the fee award, which were consolidated; the Court of Appeal “[a]ffirmed.” (Id. at pp. 399, 407.) The opinion is certified for publication except Discussion parts B (juror misconduct) and C (attorney fees); the analysis here rests only on the published part A. (Id. at pp. 388, 393.)

Issue

The published question was narrow but significant: whether substantial evidence supported the jury’s finding that the harassment was “sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of Carranza’s employment,” where Carranza “did not experience harassment directly” — she never witnessed officers viewing the photo, never received it from a coworker, and was never confronted about it to her face — but knew, secondhand, that a degrading look-alike photo of her was circulating widely and that the Department had refused to stop it. (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at pp. 393, 399.) On appeal the City did “not challenge the jury’s findings that the challenged conduct was unwelcome, that it occurred because of Carranza’s sex, [or] that the City failed to take immediate corrective action”; it contested only severity or pervasiveness. (Id. at p. 403.)

Holding

Reasoning

1. The standard of review and the FEHA framework. Reviewing for substantial evidence, the court “‘view[ed] the evidence in the light most favorable to the prevailing party,’” while cautioning that “‘substantial evidence’ is not synonymous with ‘any’ evidence” and must be “reasonable in nature, credible, and of solid value.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at pp. 399–400.) It restated the two channels of employer liability — strict liability for a supervisor’s harassment, and negligence liability for a nonsupervisor’s where the employer “‘knows or should have known of th[e] conduct and fails to take immediate and appropriate corrective action’” — and the three-element Lyle test. (Id. at p. 401, quoting Bailey v. San Francisco Dist. Attorney’s Office (2024) 16 Cal.5th 611, 635.)

2. Section 12923 recalibrated the “severe or pervasive” bar. The court explained that although the “‘severe or pervasive’ requirement was formerly “‘quite a high bar,’”” the Legislature’s 2019 enactment of section 12923 “reaffirms a “‘single incident of harassing conduct’” may constitute harassment,” and “‘clarified that a hostile work environment exists’” when the conduct disrupts “‘the victim’s emotional tranquility in the workplace, affect[s] the victim’s ability to perform the job as usual, or otherwise interfere[s] with and undermine[s] the victim’s personal sense of well-being.’” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at pp. 402–403, quoting Wawrzenski v. United Airlines, Inc. (2024) 106 Cal.App.5th 663, 693, and § 12923, subd. (a).) The City’s reliance on Brennan and Mokler was misplaced because those cases predate and “do not take into account section 12923’s definition of a hostile work environment.” (Id. at p. 402 & fn. 3.) “The City’s proposed blanket requirement of a ‘high standard’ of ‘extreme conduct’ in all cases is not the law.” (Id. at p. 402.)

3. This was not a “single incident” claim. The court rejected the City’s framing that Carranza rested on one unwitnessed incident at Mission Station. Her claim “was not based on a single incident in which a few fellow officers outside her unit viewed the photo, but instead was based on her reasonable understanding that the circulation continued for some length of time and involved ‘dozens if not hundreds’ of officers, both identified and unknown, throughout the LAPD.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at pp. 403–404.) That understanding was grounded in her attorney’s report that the photo “‘was circulating,’” Munoz’s account that officers were “talking about the photo everywhere he went,” and the LAPD’s own investigation confirming “the widespread circulation of the photo within the Department.” (Id. at p. 404.)

4. The employer’s inaction proved severity, not merely negligence. The court drew a crucial link between the failure to act and the severity element itself: “That the LAPD allowed the distribution to continue unchecked not only speaks to the sufficiency of the LAPD’s response to the harassment, but also to the pervasiveness and severity of the harassment itself and the impact on Carranza’s work environment.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 404, citing Schiano v. Quality Payroll Systems, Inc. (2d Cir. 2006) 445 F.3d 597, 607, fn. 7 [“‘It seems reasonable to view unpunished misconduct as being more harmful … than punished misconduct.’”].) Ample evidence showed altered work conditions: panic attacks, an overnight hospitalization, avoidance of coworkers, and impaired ability to perform her public-facing duties. (Id. at pp. 404–405, citing Bailey, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 634–635.) The court found the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Abbt v. City of Houston (5th Cir. 2022) 28 F.4th 601 “instructive”: a firefighter whose intimate video was watched by coworkers, and who “did not know … how far and wide the video had spread,” could show severe harassment affecting a term of her employment. (Id. at p. 405.)

5. FEHA does not require face-to-face harassment. The court squarely rejected the City’s premise “that a plaintiff must be harassed to her face,” holding it “inconsistent with the long-standing principle that ‘a person can perceive, and be affected by, harassing conduct’ in the relevant environment ‘by knowledge of that harassment’ as well as by ‘personal observation.’” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 406, quoting Thomas v. Regents of University of California (2023) 97 Cal.App.5th 587, 616, fn. 10.) It marshaled a line of California and federal authority — Beyda, Abbt, Herrera, Torres, and Lipsett — recognizing that harassing conduct about the plaintiff, communicated to others and then learned of by the plaintiff, “is a chain of interpersonal interactions that satisfies FEHA.” (Id. at p. 406.) The court distinguished Lyle, where the plaintiff was barred from relying on comments about other women she was unaware of; here the harassment was directed at Carranza and she knew of it. (Id. at p. 407, fn. 7.) The court closed with a principle borrowed from the Ninth Circuit: “FEHA does not reward discretion in harassing behaviors. Rather, it protects victims from workplace environments poisoned by inappropriate conduct — whether ‘sung, shouted, or whispered.’” (Id. at p. 407, quoting Sharp v. S&S Activewear, L.L.C. (9th Cir. 2023) 69 F.4th 974, 981.)

Significance

Carranza is one of the most important published harassment decisions of the post-section-12923 era, and it consolidates two developments. First, it applies the Legislature’s 2019 recalibration of the “severe or pervasive” standard to affirm a substantial verdict, joining Wawrzenski and Beltran in treating pre-2019 authorities like Brennan and Mokler as “no longer good law” to the extent they demanded “extreme” or “hellish” conditions. (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 402 & fn. 3.) Second, and more distinctively, it holds that a hostile environment can be built on secondhand knowledge — that a plaintiff need not witness the harassing conduct or be its face-to-face target to be legally affected by it. That principle matters most in the modern, digital workplace, where degrading images and comments spread among coworkers electronically and out of the target’s sight; Carranza makes clear such conduct is actionable when the plaintiff learns of it and it alters her working conditions.

The decision also fortifies a point that recurs across the Ninth Circuit’s recent harassment jurisprudence and its California analogues: an employer’s response to harassment is not merely relevant to the negligence element of liability but bears on the “severity of the harassment itself.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 404.) The same reasoning anchors the Fifth District’s contemporaneous decision in Kruitbosch v. Bakersfield Recovery Services, Inc. (2025) 114 Cal.App.5th 200, which cites Carranza for exactly this proposition. Read together, the two decisions signal that California courts will scrutinize how employers react to complaints — and will let juries treat indifference, delay, or refusal to act as evidence that the environment was hostile.

Key quotes

“We conclude substantial evidence supported the jury’s determination that Carranza endured severe or pervasive harassment that altered the conditions of her workplace, based on her secondhand knowledge that the photo was widely circulating around the Department.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 393.)

“That the LAPD allowed the distribution to continue unchecked not only speaks to the sufficiency of the LAPD’s response to the harassment, but also to the pervasiveness and severity of the harassment itself and the impact on Carranza’s work environment.” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 404.)

“FEHA does not reward discretion in harassing behaviors. Rather, it protects victims from workplace environments poisoned by inappropriate conduct — whether ‘sung, shouted, or whispered.’” (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 407, quoting Sharp v. S&S Activewear, L.L.C. (9th Cir. 2023) 69 F.4th 974, 981.)

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Practice pointer

Open questions

Because the court affirmed on the record before it, several questions remain open. It “need not address the extent to which other incidents, such as the ones at the Staples Center and the Topanga Community Station, supported Carranza’s claim,” since substantial evidence existed without them — leaving unresolved how much weight excluded, later-learned incidents may carry, and whether the trial court’s in limine exclusion of Carranza’s knowledge of those incidents was correct (a ruling the affirmance did not need to reach). (Carranza, supra, 111 Cal.App.5th at p. 404, fn. 4.) The opinion also does not fix a floor for how much “secondhand knowledge” suffices; that remains a totality-of-the-circumstances question for future cases. And because Discussion parts B and C are unpublished, the opinion supplies no citable guidance on the juror-misconduct or attorney-fee issues the City also raised. Finally, the court invoked the Ninth Circuit’s “ambient harassment” reasoning from Sharp approvingly but in the specific context of look-alike photo circulation, leaving the full translation of that framework into FEHA for later development.