Kansas City Chiefs place kicker Harrison Butker arrives before the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Emily Curiel ecuriel@kcstar.com
Two Kansas City communications staffers feared for their safety after they were falsely accused last year of doxxing Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker on the city’s social media account after he made some controversial remarks. The women were subjected to hateful, racist and misogynistic online threats and feared for their safety.
Now both are suing the city, claiming that Mayor Quinton Lucas and other city officials refused to clear their names, which damaged their reputations and allowed the harassment to continue.
April Leonard, the city’s former social media manager, levied those allegations in a court filing this week. The document amended the employment discrimination lawsuit she filed against the city in March.
Leonard, who still works for the city in a different job, alleged in that initial petition for damages that she was the victim of employment discrimination based on the city’s failure to fully accommodate her needs as someone who suffers from an autoimmune condition.
The second amended petition filed this week includes details about the Butker incident and gives one reason why it was possible for someone to post an unauthorized message on the city’s X account. Leonard’s petition says the city was lax in granting multiple employees access to its social media accounts. She claims that she repeatedly expressed concerns about that to her bosses, fearing that it made her and a co-worker “vulnerable, as they were identifiable as social media managers for the City.”
Last month, Leonard’s co-worker Andrea Watts also alleged in a court filing that city officials did too little to clear her name after she was misidentified as being responsible for an unsigned May 14, 2024 posting on X that said Butker lives in Lee’s Summit. The person who wrote it was trying in a sarcastic way to distance Kansas City from the comments Butker made at a college graduation ceremony that some found offensive.
Neither woman had anything to do with the post. Another person with access to the city’s X account was found to be responsible and fired.
City officials deleted and apologized for the message about Butker 40 minutes after it was posted. The city’s account was inundated with angry comments accusing the city of putting Butker in peril by noting the name of the Kansas City suburb where he lives.
That’s not the strict definition of doxxing because the post did not give Butker’s address. Lee’s Summit had 106,000 residents as of a year ago, according the Census Bureau.
Racist threats
But the two women were doxxed in a true sense . Critics of the Butker post searched for and posted the women’s names, where they lived and other personal information, supposing they were responsible based solely on them having social media responsibilities in the city’s communications department.
According to the lawsuits, they got death threats and were denounced with ugly slurs. Both women are Black and were vilified based on their race and gender.
“There is no hole deep enough, no woods deep enough for you to hide in,” one post read, according to the lawsuit Watts filed.
Another pictured a Black woman hanging from a tree in front of a photograph of the apartment building where Watts lived along with her full name and address.
Leonard was called a “ghetto rat” and the N word, her lawsuit said. Someone called Savage Ravage said Butker should sue city officials and “I hope everyone involved in running this account d!es of AIDS and ass cancer. And that’s the least of what you deserve.”
Leonard was terrified, the suit says. She called the police after seeing two men watching her house. The city agreed to put her up in a hotel for two nights, but refused to cover her meals. And both she and Watts say the city never made the public statement they requested stating clearly that they were not the people responsible for the Butker post.
Instead, Mayor Quinton Lucas pleaded with the public to stop harassing the women, but he never named them.
“Over the past 24 hours, some seeking to harass, bully, and intimidate have sent slurs and threats to and shared photos of women employees with no involvement with recent City posts,” he said on X. “Honestly, please just stop, be decent. The buck stops with me. Please leave them alone.”
Lucas, a Democrat, later accused Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, of keeping the furor going by appearing on TV and demanding an investigation.
“I was disheartened when the City failed to support me and a colleague regarding the Butker tweet, leading to ongoing and undue public scrutiny, harassment, and a hostile work environment,” Leonard said in a news release issued by her attorney, Heather Schlozman. “We pleaded for help and our safety, asking for the City to clear our names immediately. That stress exacerbated my autoimmune condition and ultimately led to hospitalizations.”
The lawsuits seek monetary damages and any relief a court sees fit.
The city does not comment on pending litigation or personnel matters, city spokeswoman Sherae Honeycutt said.