Former health department employee, Rebekah Jones, granted official whistleblower status

Miami Hearld via TampaBay ^ | 05 28 2021 | Sarah Blaskey

[yesthatjallen]

Rebekah Jones is officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday.

Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about “misleading data” being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald.

In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for “opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website.” She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed “represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public.”

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that “the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes,” according to the email obtained by the Herald.

Whistleblower status offers Jones certain protections under Florida law, including the potential for reinstatement or compensation should the ongoing investigation find the department retaliated against Jones for the concerns she raised last year.

It’s pretty huge,” Jones told the Herald in response to the news. “This isn’t vindication but this is a start. It’s a big push forward.”

The Florida Department of Health and the governor’s office did not immediately respond to the Herald’s response for comment.

SNIP

[yesthatjallen]

Florida Scientist Says She Was Fired For Not Manipulating COVID-19 Data

[IndispensableDestiny]

Sociopathic stalker.

[Karliner]

Hasn’t she done this before and been fired? She has a few loose screws in that outboard motor?

[piasa]

She’s not a scientist.

[piasa]

From another thread :
“Jones’ past includes stalking, battery on a police officer, repeated incarcerations, an institutionalization, an ankle monitor, a restraining order and court-ordered medication. And that’s long before the DeSantis administration hired her as a web designer. “

[piasa]

Married Florida data scientist axed for refusing to alter COVID-19 stats was fired from university job for having affair with a student and charged with stalking, threatening him with revenge porn, writing a 342-page manifesto on their sex life
5/26/2020, 3:10:05 PM · by knighthawk · 54 replies
UK Daily Mail ^ | May 26 2020 | JOSE LAMBIET
The fired Florida Health Department employee in charge of the state’s COVID-19 response website has a lurid past including three arrests, a torrid affair with her student and being fired from her previous university teaching job, a DailyMail.com investigation can reveal. Rebekah Jones, 30, claims she was asked to leave by health officials this month because she refused to fudge coronavirus infection numbers. But a different picture has now emerged after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that Jones was canned because of insubordination and called her ‘disruptive.’ A DailyMail.com investigation has revealed Jones, a married mother-of-two, was fired from Florida...

[Ed Condon]

She knows how to code.

[phoneman08]

Rebekah Jones is officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday.

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that “the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes,” according to the email obtained by the Herald.

Such is the state of "journalism" in today's America.

[qaz123]

How would one get a job working for the government?

[piasa]

Apparently it is not too difficult. Used to be you could have a criminal record and still get hired as a jail guard.

[milagro]

Didn’t Cuomo made that a requirement for being a jail guard?:)

[John S Mosby]

She was a MINOR employee for the people who were in charge of developing and publishing the data board. That’s all. She has a criminal record also. She is full of crap! Now let her prove it. This is political fodder out of Dade County liberal crazies.

[John S Mosby]

Yes- she has NOT been “granted” whistleblower status, merely informed that the disclosure meets the criteria to apply for the status. Which they will not grant on the basis of the facts known, and presented by the Governor. Scam artist is what she is.

[Da Coyote]

“She has a few loose screws in that outboard motor?”
Heh, that’s a long way of describing a Democrat.

[cpdiii]

She is kinda hot. However, on the crazy hot axis she is up in the far right hand corner. “Danger Will Robinson Danger” from “Lost in Space” which I suspect she is.

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Already been shown to have lied egregiously about the data “manipulation”.

[lewislynn]

She’s crazy...but delicious.

[rlmorel]

This woman was (and is) a psycho, and any person reading this (never mind an IT person) would immediately grasp the nature of this woman, and wonder why she wasn't escorted out of the building on day one with a cardboard box full of her belongings.

When you read what this woman did, it is astonishing (this is derived from the full article at the New York Post:

NEW YORK POST: How a fake whistleblower peddled lies about Florida’s COVID deaths

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Jones’ bad behavior was first formally reported on May 6, 2020, when the IT director at the FDOH, Craig Curry, emailed the department’s labor relations consultant, Tiffany Hicks, “looking for guidance” on “properly documenting actions of one of my employees and to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.” Among the “actions” that Curry sought to “document” were that the employee — Rebekah Jones — had written “posts on website [sic] and social media regarding data and web product owned by the Department that she works on without permission of management or communications”; that she had released infographics that “should have been identical to data published by our communication department” but were not; and, most seriously, that she had possibly exposed “personnel data” in the process.

Asked to clarify the problem by Hicks, Curry confirmed that, between April 9 and April 30, 2020, he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission, and, more specifically, that he had told her to stop releasing health department data or representing her employer without consent.

In her response to Curry, sent later that day, Hicks proposed one of two actions: that Jones should either be “separated” (i.e., fired) or else be put through a “Management Counseling” procedure that would “address and document the recent incidents.” The latter process, Hicks explained, “would be informal and would not be placed in the employee’s personnel file.” But “if similar behavior continues,” she added, “it is a [sic] management’s decision to move forward with termination.”

Apparently, the department chose the second action, because, by the end of the day, Jones was still working at the FDOH, albeit in a slightly altered role. In his notes, Curry records that, having been “instructed by management to replace Ms. Jones as primary on the COVID Dashboard,” he called her “to notify her that she was being removed from her duties as primary GIS [geographic information system] developer on the department’s COVID-19 dashboard.”

Again: This was not a termination. As Curry explicitly noted, Jones “was informed that she was maintaining her role as GIS team manager and was to resume normal day to day responsibilities, but she was to cease any duties and administrative roles associated with the COVID-19 GIS dashboard.”

The next day, on May 7, 2020, Jones crashed the dashboard.

Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department’s IT staff. “Because the team was not informed,” Curry wrote, it “began troubleshooting the issue as if it were a system issue” — which, of course, it was not. In the process, the FDOH asked Chris Duclos, a GIS manager and the only other person besides Jones who had “full administrative right [sic] in our system[,] to help.” This Duclos did, primarily “by modifying ownership of objects to return the process to the previous state” — that is, to roll back the system to how it had been when it was working. At 1 p.m. that day, aware that Duclos was reversing her power grab, Jones locked Duclos out of his account.

By 1:35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos’ full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would, and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi. Except … she didn’t.

Instead, as Curry recorded, Jones set Duclos’ permissions to a lower level than administrator and left herself as the sole person within the FDOH who had administrator status. In response, Duclos emailed the state’s GIS vendor and re­quested that his full permissions be restored. This was done.

Then came a lull. Having been asked what on Earth she was doing, Jones claimed that she had set herself up as the sole administrator as the result of “security concerns,” and, under the impression that this excuse had been accepted by the department, she started playing nice. Two days later, Curry reported, “the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward.”

At 9:30 a.m. May 15, encouraged by the improvement in Jones’ behavior, and having got the dashboard back up and running, the FDOH decided that “Manage­ment Counseling was still the correct option for previous occurrences.”

That decision would last for only a few hours: At 1:46 p.m., Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard — many of whom were external to the department — explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data. Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story. Three days later, Jones was fired.

From that moment on, Jones has sought relentlessly to portray herself as a martyr who was dismissed for telling “the truth.” Having waffled a little in the first few days, she quickly hit upon a specific claim to bolster this overall impression: that she was instructed by Dr. Shamarial Roberson — the well-respected chronic disease epidemiologist who is currently serving as Florida’s deputy secretary of health, and is the first African American to hold that post — to “delete cases and deaths” in order to present a rosier version of what was happening in the state. Absurdly accusing this official of being a “liar, fraud, murderer,” Jones now says that Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”

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This is the same woman that a police report obtained by Ocala Post from Tallahassee charged that Rebekah Jones, the woman who claimed she was fired from the DOH for refusing to falsify COVID-19 data, has an open criminal investigation for sexual cyberharassment and cyberstalking. The charges came after a man who previously had a restraining order against Jones said she created a revenge porn website and posted nude photos of him.

According to the police report, Jones shared the website with the man’s employer, family, and friends..

She was also fired from Florida State University in 2017 for having an affair with a student -- and later was charged with cyberstalking.

Someone like this should be incarcerated, fined, made to pay restitution, and never be allowed to work in the field again. Granted, she sounds like she is mentally ill. But the Left in the Media and the Democrat party have ALWAYS found mentally ill people useful, as James O'Keefe's Project Veritas displays one of their dirty "fixers" bragging about in a videoed recording.

[StAnDeliver]

I had an interesting exchange with this psycho on Twitter in regards to the DailyMail expose on her affair, the stalking charges, and an outstanding Florida warrant for her arrest re: January 2020...

EXCLUSIVE: Married Florida data scientist [Rebekah Jones] axed for refusing to alter COVID-19 stats, was fired from university job for having affair with a student and charged with stalking, threatening him with revenge porn, writing a 342-page manifesto on their sex life...Her 3rd of 3 arrests was from violating an active trespass (restraining) order against her, taken out by FSU.

[Magnatron]

Please...

Y'all gotta stop. You have been wearing your masks too high on your face during COVID. Now that the pandemic is over, you can emerge and witness hot girls again.

For training purposes...

This is hot:

This is not...

...so not:

Any questions?