A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has thrown out a nearly 5-year-old wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the highly paid former executive assistant and secret ex-girlfriend of Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr.
Judge Lia Martin granted the city’s request for summary judgment Nov. 6 after the plaintiff, Melanie McDade-Dickens, who is now representing herself, failed to file an opposition to the motion, according to court records. The long-delayed case was set to go to trial in May.
Mira Hashmall, the attorney representing the city, confirmed the outcome in an email.
“This case was frivolous from the start, and things just got worse for Ms. McDade after we uncovered extensive spoliation of evidence, perjury and other litigation misconduct,” Hashmall said. “We are thrilled that the Court has resolved all claims in favor or Mayor Butts and the city.”
In late October, McDade-Dickens requested a 21-day extension of summary judgment hearing as she was not aware of the motions filed due to extenuating circumstances.
“At this time, I am seeking both legal representation and permanent housing,” she wrote. “I have not had permanent housing since before my last hearing on April 7, 2025, as well as phone service.”
Reached by email, McDade-Dickens declined to answer questions about the judge’s ruling.
“I am just disappointed that it had to come to this just to save my own sanity, and respect for myself,” she wrote.
Her attorneys had previously asked for $65 million to settle.
The initial complaint alleged the city’s leadership placed McDade-Dickens on leave in July 2019 and then fired her that December in retaliation for ending a nearly decade-long secret relationship with Butts in 2018. Her attorneys argued McDade-Dickens’ professional relationship with the mayor was conditioned upon submitting to his sexual advances, some of which took place within City Hall.
The former executive assistant, who became one of the highest paid employees in the city, alleged she faced sexual harassment, endured verbal abuse and lost lucrative assignments because of the breakup in 2018.
Inglewood, however, maintains McDade-Dickens was fired for cause after allegedly persuading a subordinate to co-sign a home loan in exchange for preferential treatment for her son in the city’s first-time-homebuyer program. The city also alleged she altered financial records and lied about a hardship to withdraw money from a retirement account early to cover the mortgage’s down payment.
They accused her of interfering with the city’s internal investigation by contacting witnesses.
Text messages released in the case appeared to show McDade-Dickens telling a subordinate to delete images of an altered pay stub after sending it to a real estate agent working on her home loan.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she wrote.
Other text messages and emails released during the case detailed a nasty breakup, with Butts repeatedly accusing McDade-Dickens of cheating and McDade-Dickens accusing Butts of being controlling.
The excerpts started and stopped in the middle of conversations and often lacked context. The communications, however, include sexual language, verbal insults from both sides and insinuations about the legitimacy of McDade-Dickens’ career. Several showed there was seemingly little barrier between McDade-Dickens and Butts’ personal and professional lives.
“I made your life, you are so ungrateful,” Butts allegedly wrote in July 2018, a few months after the breakup.
In other messages, Butts suggested he used his elected position to bring McDade-Dickens into a “career at a payscale few in public service ever reach” and built her “from a shattered, battered woman into an executive.” Butts wrote that he paid for and completed parts of McDade-Dickens’ college coursework — which the city later listed as a requirement of her expanded job duties — and accused her of using the career and salary he gave her to the benefit of a new romantic partner.
“I worked for you so that you could qualify to be where you are,” he wrote.
McDade-Dickens made less than $17,430 in 2010 while working on Butts’ first campaign for mayor. By 2019, she was the second highest paid employee in the city with a total pay of $349,077, according to Transparent California, a public pay and pension database.
Procedural mistakes and missed deadlines plagued McDade-Dickens’ case from the beginning. The city’s attorneys, who have repeatedly denied the allegations against Butts, seized on those deficiencies to score critical victories on technicalities that hobbled the case at every opportunity.
McDade-Dickens switched law firms twice before electing to represent herself earlier this year.
The first setback occurred in 2021 when a judge threw out the sexual harassment portion, ruling that McDade-Dickens and her attorneys had missed a one-year filing deadline. That decision limited key parts of McDade-Dickens’ case to incidents that occurred after she filed a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in July 2019, the same month she was placed on leave.
A separate attempt to obtain a domestic violence restraining order in 2022 failed, with the judge in that case denying the request due to insufficient evidence. The city’s attorneys later would use that ruling to argue that the non-sexual harassment portions of McDade-Dickens’ lawsuit had already been litigated.
Then, in March 2025, McDade-Dickens was ordered to pay $217,404 in sanctions for causing delays to the case by failing to turn over records requested by the defense through discovery. The city’s attorneys alleged McDade-Dickens had destroyed evidence that would prove the firing was justified.
Martin chastised McDade-Dickens for “discovery abuse” and barred her and her attorneys from introducing new evidence that would support her allegations.
An appeal of that decision was filed, but then later abandoned, according to court records. McDade-Dickens began representing herself shortly after the sanctions were issued.
In their motion for summary judgment, Inglewood’s attorneys argued the prohibition on new evidence, the ruling in the restraining order case and the time frame limitations set by the missed deadlines now made it impossible for McDade-Dickens to try the case.
McDade-Dickens would not say whether she planned to appeal.