Former Lafayette Councilman and POS Race Baiter Chris Williams in trouble, Again

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A former Lafayette City-Parish councilman who led a troubled Acadiana nonprofit agency has been accused of pressuring an employee into having sex in the office and attempting to buy her silence with a promotion and $10,000 bribe.

The official also allegedly kept a voodoo doll wrapped in one of the woman's socks in his desk, according to a recently filed federal lawsuit and an interview with her attorney.

The lawsuit claims that Chris Williams, the ex-CEO of St. Martin-Iberia-Lafayette Community Action Agency, widely known as SMILE, allegedly began sexually harassing the woman shortly after he was hired in 2017.

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Finally, the employee alleges that SMILE fired her in retaliation after she reported Williams for sexual harassment and took leave due to emotional distress.

Williams, who resigned from SMILE amid an undisclosed investigation last summer, does not have a lawyer listed in court and could not be reached despite multiple calls to his cell phone. SMILE officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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The sex harassment lawsuit, which was filed in the Western District of Louisiana federal court in January but has not been publicly reported until now, sheds new light on turmoil inside SMILE, a taxpayer-funded nonprofit organization that administers a range of social services in a large portion of Acadiana. SMILE once had an annual budget of about $20 million — mostly consisting of federal Head Start funding — but it lost this funding due to mishandling of reports of child abuse.

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