Jenny’s life finally seemed to be heading in the right direction. There was her house, near Sloan’s Lake, that she shared with her white terrier, Benny. In her free time, she created oil paintings. Pandemic restrictions were easing by then, which meant she could spend more time with her friends. Money had been tight for a few years, but in January 2021 the property management company where she worked part time gave her a raise and a promotion to full-time executive assistant. Life wasn’t perfect, but she was happy.

A month after her promotion, Jenny says she asked a colleague named Bill if he could meet to discuss a new lease and her bio for the company’s website. (Last names have been omitted to protect Jenny’s privacy.) Bill agreed. Employees were working remotely at the time, so he asked Jenny to stop by his house that afternoon. When Jenny arrived, he poured her a glass of wine. That wasn’t unusual. The company culture was casual, and having a drink during a late afternoon meeting was common.

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Bill was single and “kind of a strange guy,” Jenny says. “You know, like, white tube socks with big white shoes.” They started talking about work, but soon Bill said he was done with the “shop talk.” He told her how much he and Paul, the owner of the company and Jenny’s boss, appreciated her. From there, the conversation took a turn. She should come scuba diving with him and Paul, Bill said. She should wear dresses to work. Does she always wear black? Then: “Are you fucking Brandon?”

Jenny was incredulous. She forced a laugh. No, she said, she was not in a romantic relationship with one of their co-workers. Jenny walked into the kitchen. Bill followed her. He grabbed her by the waist, pushed her against the countertop, and tried to kiss her. She shoved him away, saying, “No, no, no, hey, like, this is not….” Bill pulled back.

Jenny suggested they finish the meeting at a nearby restaurant, a public setting where she would feel safer. In a later court filing, Jenny said Bill continued the harassment at the restaurant. He tried to kiss her again, touched her hands and face, and pressured her to finish her drink. She pushed him away, said she wasn’t interested, and left.

The following two years would be the hardest of Jenny’s life. She’d lose her job, her health, and, ultimately, her faith in a civil rights system that she believed would protect her.

Jenny says she called Paul, the company’s owner, the next day. “Paul’s the type of guy, if you’re at the airport, and he doesn’t get, like, a first-class seat, he’s up there yelling,” Jenny says. She didn’t condone that type of behavior, but she put up with it because she thought her career would grow with the company. Now she was worried about the future; in their new office, her desk would be near Bill’s. She didn’t want Bill fired, but she didn’t want to work directly with him anymore. She hoped Paul would handle it.

Jenny remembers Paul immediately blaming her, asking, What did you do? Oh, my God, what did you do? Then he tried to brush it off. Don’t you know, office romances, that’s how things start? Jenny said she didn’t want to date Bill. Eventually, Paul grew frustrated. Bill and Paul had been friends and business associates for decades. Bill was an attorney; Jenny, an executive assistant.

Paul became more critical of her over the next month, Jenny says. She eventually told him she wasn’t comfortable working in the same office as Bill. Paul started yelling, Jenny remembers, accusing her of “going back and forth” on the issue. When Jenny started to cry, she remembers Paul saying: “This crying thing isn’t going to get you out of going into the office.”

Wary of what might happen next, Jenny began working with two Denver-based civil rights attorneys, Ariel DeFazio and Mary Jo Lowrey. Almost a month after Jenny’s encounter with Bill, Paul demoted Jenny back to part time and cut her pay. About a week later, he fired her via text message. (Paul did not respond to emailed questions from 5280 about Jenny’s allegations. In legal documents, Paul claimed Jenny volunteered for the demotion and pay cut. However, when Paul texted Jenny, asking her to write an email acknowledging that she’d made those decisions, Jenny refused and said he was pressuring her to resign.)

After Jenny’s termination, in May 2021, Jenny filed a claim with the state agency meant to protect workers: the Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD). The CCRD and its federal counterpart, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), exist to investigate and resolve discrimination cases so the overburdened court system doesn’t have to. In theory, the agency filters out frivolous cases, and its mediators can help parties settle the stronger ones. For wronged employees, the CCRD is supposed to be a faster (court cases can take years) and cheaper (it’s free and you don’t need an attorney) way to get relief. Once a CCRD complaint is filed, an investigator gathers evidence and reaches a conclusion. If they decide discrimination or retaliation likely occurred, they issue a “probable cause” finding. If the agency decides there’s not enough evidence, the process results in a “no cause” finding.

To ensure workers don’t go straight to court, both federal and state law require that every workplace discrimination claim first go through the EEOC or CCRD. The CCRD is given about six months to investigate or settle each case, but the work usually takes longer. After six months, an employee can either let the agency finish its investigation or request a “right to sue”—essentially a pass that lets the employee go to court. (No matter what CCRD decides after an investigation, an employee can still take a case to court).

Jenny was nervous but hopeful when she submitted her complaint to the CCRD. She had been a good employee for more than four years. Less than two months before Jenny was fired, Paul had given her a positive performance review and a promotion.

A CCRD investigator interviewed Jenny, Paul, and another employee who’d witnessed some of Paul’s increasingly hostile conduct toward Jenny. Bill, who Jenny says had moved to Florida, wasn’t interviewed. (He died in 2025, after the investigation was complete.) Her attorneys submitted emails and text messages they believed showed Paul’s escalating hostility. The case sat with the CCRD for more than seven months. Meanwhile, Jenny lived with a pit in her stomach and couldn’t sleep.

Finally, an investigator called DeFazio, Jenny’s attorney, and told her the agency was going to find no cause and asked if she wanted a right to sue instead. Jenny was stunned. “I felt hopeless,” she says.

Jenny may have been shocked, but DeFazio wasn’t. She knows what many civil rights attorneys in Colorado do: It’s almost impossible to get a probable cause finding from the CCRD. It’s like “a lightning strike out of the sky,” says Darold Killmer, a civil rights attorney in Denver who’s been practicing for 40 years.

From fiscal year 2016-’17 to 2024-’25, the CCRD closed a total of 9,536 workplace discrimination cases. Its average annual probable cause rate was 2.67 percent. “The statistics on cause findings are just ridiculous,” says Diane King, another Denver civil rights attorney. “There’s no way that all of our cases are that crummy.”

Workplace discrimination complaints make up almost 80 percent of the CCRD’s cases each year. When the rest are added in—including cases against landlords and businesses open to the public—the agency’s probable cause rate over the past nine years creeps up to 3.67 percent. Still, Colorado trails several states. The rate in Minnesota in 2024 was 7.6 percent. Idaho’s average in 2021 was 10 percent. And the statewide rate in New York from 2015 to 2021 was 14.8 percent.

Even when an employee receives a probable cause decision, that doesn’t mean they’ve won. Instead, the case goes to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a board of seven volunteers appointed by the governor. The commissioners decide whether to set the case for trial with an administrative law judge. That judge then looks at the evidence and decides whether to award any relief—everything from getting their job back to recouping lost wages or other monetary awards. But that almost never happens. From 2020 to 2023, only 18 employment discrimination cases got a hearing. Zero reached a judge in 2024. (One possible reason for those low numbers: If the CCRD returns a probable cause finding, an employer might be eager to settle.)

For workers who don’t have lawyers—about 70 percent of all complaints are filed by people without an attorney—a no cause finding often leads them to believe they wouldn’t stand a chance in court. The opposite is often true, Killmer says: “Some of the best cases I’ve ever had come from no cause findings.” Nevertheless, many employees spurned by the CCRD will never file a lawsuit. They won’t have the money to hire an attorney or won’t want to endure the emotional toll of a trial. “It can be completely devastating if you had a strong case and the CCRD or the EEOC just kind of blew you off,” says Katie Brown, an attorney who formerly taught at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and has defended employers in discrimination claims.

The debate over a case’s strength is difficult to settle because there’s no clear standard for what probable cause is: The Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) doesn’t define it, and attorneys quibble over its interpretation. Most lawyers I spoke to for this story said it should mean there’s a 51 percent chance that something illegal happened. Others say it should be less than that.

J. David Penwell served as legal counsel for the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the 1960s, not long after the modern CCRD was created. In a 1969 article for the Denver Law Journal, Penwell argued probable cause should be a low bar to clear. “Any evidence” of a “discriminatory motive” should be enough, he wrote. Perhaps “even a scintilla of evidence”—a hint or a trace—“should be sufficient for a finding of probable cause.” In practice though, nearly every civil rights attorney and a former CCRD investigator I spoke to agreed: Probable cause applied by the agency today is closer to the highest standard—proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Aubrey Sullivan, CCRD’s current director, started as an investigator in the aughts before leaving to work for a law firm that represented employers in discrimination cases. In 2016, Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies’ then director—current Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse—appointed Sullivan to lead the CCRD.

This past October, I asked Sullivan what it takes for an employee to get a decision in their favor. She responded with a hypothetical age discrimination case in which someone made a “direct comment” like “they’re too old.” Does it need to be that explicit? “Yes,” she said.

“We are not advocates,” Sullivan says. She measures success “by feeling like we are helping people on both sides, not just [employees], because we’re a neutral fact-finding agency.” She made that point three times during our interview: The CCRD is neutral. (CADA requires the agency to presume innocence until evidence proves discrimination occurred.) “That is kind of pounded into your head from day one,” says a former CCRD investigator who asked for anonymity to speak freely about the agency. “This is a neutral organization.”

“I was not neutral,” says Steve Chavez, who led the CCRD from 2007 to 2015. “I wasn’t unfair, but I was not neutral.” He viewed the agency’s role differently than his successor, pushing for greater advocacy for the state’s vulnerable populations. Under Chavez, the CCRD’s probable cause rate for employment cases was over double the rate under Sullivan—around six percent from 2007-’08 to 2013-’14. “I think since my tenure, the CCRD has really shut down quite a bit,” Chavez says.

Although the agency’s probable cause rate lags those of other states, it’s similar to the federal EEOC’s (about 2.74 percent, slightly higher than the CCRD’s). A 2019 report by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit media organization, found the EEOC handled a significant backlog by closing cases without any investigation. “If they’re in line with the EEOC,” says Killmer, who worked for the federal agency in the 1990s, “they need to do something better.”

When people hear about the CCRD’s “investigations,” they might imagine investigators bursting through doors, interviewing witnesses, and hauling off evidence. “It wasn’t like that,” says the former CCRD investigator. “It was very much just paperwork-driven.”

The CCRD’s 2023 manual mandates that the roughly 20 investigators—many of whom are lawyers, though that’s not a requirement—conduct a minimum of two interviews for every case. But DeFazio says the CCRD rarely speaks to anyone, including her clients, and still issues no cause findings. Killmer says the agency will commonly ask an attorney if they want a right to sue without having conducted any interviews. “That’s a very common experience,” Killmer says. “That’s probably more common than not.” (Sullivan says this would be “a rare occurrence” and typically happens “when an attorney reaches out” for the right to sue, not the other way around.) King has also seen no cause findings without witness interviews. “Oh sure, lots of times,” she says.

Sullivan denies that investigators aren’t interviewing witnesses: “Our managers, if I can be absolutely honest, are very, very strict when it comes to interviews and making sure that we’re looking at all of the evidence.” However, one attorney showed me a recent email from a CCRD investigator who said witness interviews are up to the investigator’s discretion and that none would be conducted at that time.

When I asked Sullivan via email if investigators are required to conduct interviews, she responded: “All Division investigators are expected to follow the processes outlined in the Intake and Investigations Manual with regard to relevant witnesses. Investigators work with Division management to decide whether a witness’s testimony will be relevant or directly related to the charge (and thus likely to either corroborate or refute the allegations of discrimination).”

State law requires the agency to resolve a case within a certain time frame. A 2019 audit found that the CCRD had failed to close approximately 39 percent of its cases by the deadline, which was 270 days at the time. (In 2022, the state Legislature changed the law to give the agency 450 days, though Sullivan says they still aim for the previous deadline.)

The former CCRD investigator described working for the CCRD as a “pressure cooker.” Each investigator handled a caseload of 50 to 75 cases at any given time. (Sullivan says the current caseload per investigator is about the same.) The investigator says managers would constantly remind everyone: “We need to get done more cases. We need to get done more cases. We’re not closing enough.”

The investigator told me he was one of the few “who wanted to do more thorough investigations when possible.” But when he did, he was pressured by managers, who would ask “why we couldn’t just go no probable cause, or, if it was a close call, why couldn’t we just contact the employee and see if they would just accept a right to sue letter?” Some investigators were afraid to find probable cause because it would be more closely scrutinized by department managers, many of whom had been with the CCRD for years and developed a “don’t rock the boat” culture, the investigator says. The easier option was to find no cause. “It would just slide through,” the investigator says. “One more case to be [closed] in the overall factory.”

Some lawyers believe the CCRD’s numbers are so low because the agency lacks resources. Over the past few years, the number of complaints filed with the CCRD has risen, from around 1,500 in 2020-’21 to almost 1,800 in 2023-’24, a 20 percent increase. The CCRD’s budget also increased by about 43 percent during the same span, from $3.9 million to $5.6 million. Sullivan says that’s enough money to fulfill the agency’s obligations: “We are able to handle the cases.”

Chavez, the former CCRD director, says he faced challenges with insufficient funding while at the helm. I told him Sullivan expressed no concern over the CCRD’s budget. “Well then,” Chavez replied, “there’s no goddamn excuse not to do a good job on these cases.”

In February 2023, Jenny stood inside a courtroom in downtown Denver. Her two attorneys were on each side of her, holding her hands. Two years after she’d been harassed at work, Jenny’s case had gone to trial. The proceedings lasted four days, and now the jury had a verdict.

Not long after she’d been fired, Jenny was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy. Jenny recently looked back on her experience going through the CCRD and trial. “That was worse,” she says, “than the actual breast cancer treatment itself.” Her attorneys had warned her that her private life was going to be exposed and her character attacked during the trial to make her look untrustworthy. “My psychiatrist had to show up to court and testify,” she says.

As the verdict was read out loud, Jenny looked down. The jury unanimously found that her former company and boss had discriminated and retaliated against her. They awarded her more than a million dollars. Jenny started to cry.

Jenny wonders if news of the verdict ever made its way back to the CCRD: “Do they go, Oh shit, we missed that one?” She still paints and enjoys watching the Broncos. “I’ve been through hell,” she says. “I’ve been beat up quite a bit, and I’m just trying to keep going forward.” She paused for a moment. “And you know what? Life is good. I’m getting past cancer, and I’m past having to deal with [that] guy.”

Jenny still hasn’t been paid much of the money she won at trial. The jury may have awarded her more than $1 million, but $900,000 of that was levied against the company, and Colorado law caps how much an employee can collect from a small business at $25,000, to protect owners from potentially ruinous liability. The jury decided Paul was personally responsible for $420,000; he declared bankruptcy and is fighting to dissolve any debts, including the money he owes Jenny.

“But it was at least validating to see the jury’s outrage,” DeFazio says. “All in a case that the CCRD said it would find no cause on.”