Continuing to deviate from normal public-affairs protocol, when asked why I had been relieved, depot representatives said that I had disobeyed orders, I had abused my Marines, and that the depot had investigated because my Marines had told the leadership they were being mistreated.2
Twelve days later, the New York Times posted a detailed article about my relief, as well as links to both the damning command investigation into my leadership and the equal-opportunity investigation based on my complaints.3 They were posted online for all the world to see.
The investigations consisted of pages and pages of redacted, or blacked-out names—horrible statements about someone named Kate Germano, a female Marine who was mean and abusive to her subordinates.
I didn't recognize this person.
As I laid out in my command philosophy, I was accountable for everything my Marines did or didn't do. I get that 100 percent. For any of my Marines to say that I never admit when I'm wrong is simply unfair, because I'm the first one to say I make mistakes every day. I'm not the smartest person on the planet, and making mistakes is part of learning. I admit that there were times when I did things wrongly and my frustration got the best of me.
Were there times I rolled my eyes during meetings? Most likely.
Were there times I got irritated with my executive officer in front of others? I think that is true.
Did I take issue with DIs who were cruel to each other and their recruits? Yes.
Did I express dissatisfaction with company commanders who did not take ownership of their companies by leading, mentoring, and holding their Marines accountable? Absolutely.
But here's the thing: I was not wrong for having high standards for my Marines and recruits.
I was right about the rifle range.
I was right that the recruiters weren't holding female recruits accountable for preparing mentally and physically to succeed in training.
I was right to try to bring order to the chaos of Fourth Battalion by eliminating DI and recruit abuse, and by leading with facts and not feelings.
And after trying to get the regiment and depot leadership to see how segregation perpetuated negative expectations for women in training, I was absolutely right to pen my article.
I knew some of my Marines didn't like me. But had I ever been mean, used abusive language, or blamed victims for being sexually assaulted? Absolutely not. Never. Ever.
I knew that I had held those same Marines accountable for abusing recruits or for not doing their jobs, and that there were malcontents in the battalion. But when I read the investigation into my leadership, I was struck by the lack of evidence to support the findings. As I read page after page, the legal officer in me kept expecting to find some damning statement: Germano slapped a recruit. Germano gave an unlawful order. Germano mouthed off to her commander. Instead, the investigation is filled with unsubstantiated complaints related to whether or not my Marines thought I was nice or I was mean.
The first part of a command investigation is the “findings of fact.” Each finding of fact is not just a statement, it's a statement that should be corroborated by multiple witness statements. After all, as in the American justice system, under the military justice system, the rights of the accused are just as important as the rights of the accuser.
But instead of ensuring each finding of fact was corroborated by multiple witnesses or sources, the investigating officer had turned unsubstantiated claims made by some of my Marines into incontrovertible truths. It was also striking that in the statements included as enclosures to the investigation, several Marines said good things about my leadership and the command climate. Yet out of more than one hundred findings of fact, only a handful of positive observations were included.
And the most damning thing of all for the Marine Corps? I was never interviewed by the investigating officer. As a legal officer having completed and reviewed countless investigations, I knew that I should have been interviewed and asked specific questions about the accusations, but, shockingly, that never happened. And I was dumbstruck when I realized that the five-inch stack of counseling documents I had provided to the investigating officer was not included in the investigation as an enclosure. The papers had simply disappeared.
The investigating officer had only asked me to write a statement about how I perceived my command climate. I provided him a detailed nine-page statement describing the environment of the battalion when I took command, all of the changes we had made, and friction points due to some of the personnel and Marines who were averse to change. But my statement was only referenced in the finding of facts four times.
It is clear to me that the investigation was heavily biased to come to a particular conclusion: that I was the problem and the culture of the Marine Corps was not.
If you look at only the investigative report, you'll see that the Marines who had received bad counseling statements from me came off looking like they were performing flawlessly, and I came off looking like a ranting lunatic whose high standards were somehow impossible for my Marines and recruits to achieve. The investigating officer made it sound like it was irrational of me to want my female recruits to be able to shoot as well as their male counterparts. He implied that somehow, by requiring my Marines to ensure our female recruits were able to run faster and shoot more accurately, I was making impossible demands of them, despite the fact that these same high expectations were levied in each of the male training battalions daily.
He stated that I was “obsessed with equality” and that, in seeking to make my female recruits competitive with their male counterparts, my standards for performance were unattainable.
The equal-opportunity investigation into my complaints of gender bias and a hostile work environment with Colonel Haas wasn't much better in terms of legal sufficiency. Oddly enough,
