Sex Discrimination Protest : Navy Doctor Tells Why She Staged Confrontation

Military commanders, a Navy rescue team and a police SWAT unit waited outside the locked door of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Ann Dalrymple’s second-floor apartment at the 32nd Street Naval Station. She had barricaded herself inside with a gun and they wanted her to come out.

Instead, she slipped a small note under the locked door.

“It said simply that this is sexual discrimination being carried way too far,” the 37-year-old doctor said Tuesday in a telephone interview from her room at the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park. “It said, ‘Why don’t you boys go away?’ ”

Before the siege was over, police say, Dalrymple had shot a Navy psychiatrist and a police SWAT team member.

To Dalrymple, a physician’s daughter who grew up in the Navy town of Pensacola, Fla., sexual discrimination is at the heart of her problems with the military, culminating in the violence of Sept. 24.

She contends that it began even before she was assigned to San Diego three years ago. She said she suffered continued sexual discrimination from both Navy superiors and officials in the UC San Diego Medical Center’s residency program. She said she was passed over for operating room experience and that her hospital residency program was cut short--all because she is female.

Discrimination Suit

In April she filed a lawsuit against the medical center, after her sexual discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was turned down.

The pressure from her crumbling Navy career, Dalrymple said, drove her to seek refuge in her apartment, gun in hand, to fend off military officials who wanted her to undergo further psychiatric reviews.

While she declined to talk about the shootings, she did describe her fear of being taken from her apartment and forced to undergo more hospitalization. She said she had been tied to a hospital bed during an earlier examination.

In 1985 she purchased a small-caliber handgun, she said, and as the pressures mounted in her job, she would practice target shooting with the weapon. “I bought it for self-protection,” she said. “Everybody has some sort of thing in their house to protect against intruders.”

When the Navy psychiatrist and two officers arrived at her apartment Sept. 24 to escort her to the hospital, she refused to go.

“They came to my room and they tried to break in,” she said. “They were arrogant enough to believe they could do that, and that’s part of their sexual discrimination. So I defended my room.”

Psychiatrist James T. Fowler III was shot in the hand as he used a pass key in an attempt to open her door. “I was frightened,” she said. “I was sweating like a stevedore.”

10-Hour Siege

The siege ended 10 hours later when the SWAT team burst into her apartment. Tear gas was lobbed into the Navy dorm; Dalrymple hid in the bathroom. San Diego police said she shot Officer Edward M. Verduzco in the knee as SWAT members broke into her bathroom.

Since that night she has remained in the Navy Hospital. Navy Chief Craig Huebler said Tuesday that “the Navy feels she is a danger to herself as well as others.” He said that, until a medical diagnosis can be reached in the case, no charges will be filed.

Dalrymple’s attorney, Charles Burke, a former military judge now in private practice in Virginia Beach, Va., filed a motion Tuesday asking the Navy to either file criminal charges against his client or release her from the hospital.

“She is not free to go home,” he said. “And if you’re not free to move about, you must be confined or restrained.”

He said the U.S. attorney’s office is taking too long to decide whether military or federal charges should be filed.

“This is not a good case,” Burke said. “It’s messy. It’s got some issues in there that the U.S. attorney doesn’t care about, such as why they went in there trying to grab this woman in the first place. And Brannigan obviously has bigger fish to fry. He doesn’t need this mess.”

James W. Brannigan Jr., chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office, said: “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. No decision has been made yet.”

Burke said that, if Dalrymple is prosecuted, and the case goes to trial, he would recommend a two-pronged defense. He said it could be proven that officials unlawfully entered her home and that the men were shot only because Dalrymple attempted to protect herself “from being taken by her Navy would-be friends.”

He said it could also be shown that the Navy and the university medical center participated in a pattern of sexual discrimination against his client.

‘A Good Doctor’

“She’s a good doctor,” he said. “But she also fits the category of a whistle-blower. She’s been a pain in their backside. She calls a spade a spade and they don’t like to hear that.”

Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman at UCSD Medical Center, declined to comment on Dalrymple’s allegations of discrimination because her lawsuit is still an active case in federal court.

“The university has an obligation to insure that only those who continue to meet our standards are allowed to continue and complete their residency program,” she said. “Dr. Dalrymple was not reappointed. She availed herself of the opportunity to have this situation reviewed by an independent arbitrator . . . . The arbitrator upheld the decision not to reappoint her.”

Dr. John Alksne, head of the division on neurosurgery, said: “We evaluate our residents on many aspects of their performance,” including their ability to perform in a high-pressure system. “We take all of these criteria into account,” he said.

Chief Huebler said the Navy has not discriminated against Dalrymple, as she and her attorney allege. “That’s their personal opinion,” he said. “Naval policy prohibits sexual harassment.”

Sexual discrimination is an issue currently confronting the military.

Just last month, for instance, Pentagon advisers reported that the Navy and Marine Corps in the Pacific were engaged in discrimination and “morally repugnant” sexual harassment of female military personnel. A similar report last year accused the Army and Air Force in Europe of permitting abuses against women on duty.

It was in such an environment of sexual harassment, Dalrymple alleges, that her 12-year military record has unraveled.

After completing medical school, she said, she joined the Navy, and in June, 1984, completed an internship at the Navy hospital in Bethesda, Md.

“There were some inklings of problems even then,” she said, such as when she was ordered to perform extra surgery when the other male interns were given time off.

Sent to San Diego

She was transferred to San Diego in 1984 and enrolled in the neurosurgery residency program at the UC San Diego Medical Center. She said she had been told that she would be able to “get all the surgery I could eat.”

“But when I got there the first day, they planned it so I wouldn’t be in the operating room for the first six months,” Dalrymple said. “I complained loudly about that and I was the only female neurosurgery resident in there.

“I felt harassed and here I was trying to learn neurosurgery so I could take care of patients. They seemed to want to harass me instead. They really wouldn’t teach me anything. I was so upset, mostly because I knew that my being a woman had a lot to do with it.”

She said she was incensed when her Navy superiors would not support her in the residency program, particularly after she was decredentialed.

Instead, she said, Navy officials began to consider her suicidal and hospitalized her in January. She said she wasn’t suicidal and she said they became angry when she refused to submit to a “visible body search while doing a urinalysis.” She said she once was tied to a hospital bed with four-point leather restraints.

She said she twice tried to resign from the service, but that the Navy never officially acted on her requests.

She said she read law books and, using her home computer, drafted the discrimination lawsuit filed in April against the university. When she threatened legal action against the Navy, she said, the reprisals were stepped up. On Sept. 24 Fowler knocked on her door.

Now she worries about whether she will be allowed to attend the next court hearing on the lawsuit, set for Nov. 9.

“I’ve got some half-written motions now,” she said. “But I can’t do anything about it because I’m stuck here.”