BOULDER, Colo. — Boulder County Commissioners issued a statement of support for Boulder resident Deborah Ramirez Monday.
“We fully support an employee’s right to speak their truth and we stand with Debbie Ramirez in her courageous decision to speak up,” they wrote.
Ramirez is the second woman to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
In a story published by The New Yorker Sunday, Ramirez accused Kavanaugh of thrusting his genitals in her face and forcing her to touch them during a party in the early 1980s on the campus of Yale University.
Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the accusations against him made by Ramirez and another woman, Christine Blasey Ford, over the past several weeks. He again denied the latest allegations on Monday, calling the them “smears, pure and simple.”
According to a statement from Boulder County, Ramirez works for the Boulder County Department of Housing & Human Services as a senior volunteer coordinator. She has been a Boulder County employee since February 2013.
In a statement released Monday, county commissioners said they “stand firmly behind our brave Boulder County employee who chose to speak publicly about a demeaning and demoralizing act of sexual misconduct she experienced as a young woman.”
The statement continues:
We fully support an employee’s right to speak their truth and we stand with Deborah Ramirez in her courageous decision to speak up.
Debbie is a valued and trusted member of our Department of Housing & Human Services. She is dedicated and passionate about serving families who are most in need. She has spent the last five and a half years with Boulder County coordinating financial resources for low-income families by matching requests for support with available funding sources, matching community donors with families and individuals during the holidays, and recruiting and working with community volunteers in support of families and children. Her work has been exemplary and always a model for providing the best in public service.
We feel it is important that we use our standing as elected officials to identify ways in which the public dialogue about important issues can be improved. It is our view that the proper reaction to assault or harassment allegations should be the immediate belief of the victim, especially when their choice to speak out comes at such an enormous personal cost. We wholeheartedly assert that a person brave enough to speak up should know that they will be heard and that their claims will be granted a full investigation.
We believe Debbie Ramirez. Knowing the personal peril and unwanted spotlight that a modest civil servant like Debbie has put herself in to shed light on an all-too-common occurrence of men harassing and humiliating women when they’re at their most vulnerable grants her even more respect in our eyes.
Sexual harassment and assault should never be tolerated in our society and the more we can support those who have been victims of these crimes to safely come forward, the better chance we have of stopping the cycle.
The statement is signed by county commissioners Cindy Domenico, Deb Gardner and Elise Jones.
The commissioners’ statement comes after Ramirez’s former supervisor, Lisa Calderon, came out and heartily defended Ramirez, lauding her integrity and her fair-tempered work with victims.