Lisa McKinely: Salvation Army Boss Called Her ‘Jezebel’ Who Put ‘Spell’ On Building, Lawsuit Says

Lisa McKinely said that all she wanted to do was help people. But when she got a job doing just that at the Red Shield Lodge, a men’s homeless shelter run by the Salvation Army in Roanoke, Virginia, she ran into a bizarre obstacle, she says, in the form of a twisted boss who condemned her as a “Jezebel.”

The Salvation Army supervisor also accused McKinely of placing the entire shelter building under some sort of an evil “spell,” according to a federal lawsuit recently filed by Lisa McKinely. In the lawsuit, she claims that the lodge director, Mike Moffitt, sexually harassed her and created a hostile work environment so bad that the woman was forced to quit her job after just nine months.

For those not familiar with Biblical lore, Jezebel was a queen of ancient Israel whose name — rightly or wrongly — has come to be synonymous with female wickedness and sexual immorality.

And even though Jezebel may have received a bad rap historically, that traditional interpretation of the ancient queen as an evil, conniving temptress gives some clue as to what was really going between Moffitt and McKinely — at least according to the allegations in the woman’s lawsuit.

In fact, the problem started in her first job interview with Moffitt.

“He kind of blurted out that he wanted to discuss the elephant in the room, my looks,” she said in an interview with TV station WDBJ this week. “He was wondering how I was going to handle that in a shelter full of men.”

The question seemed awkward to McKinely, but she shrugged it off and went to work at her new job. But the problem, she says, only got worse.

“Every discussion I had with him was all leading up to being closer and closer and closer together with him,” she told the TV station.

But that wasn’t what McKinely wanted at all — and her insistence on simply doing her work as a case manager in the homeless shelter led to growing tension and conflict with her boss, the lawsuit alleges.

“He implied I had a spell over the building itself,” McKinely said. “That I made the confusion and the frustration and the arguments take place because of my ‘Jezebel spirit.'”

Eventually, the suit says, Moffitt flat-out told her that she was “too attractive” to receive a promotion.

She also says she went over Moffitt’s head and complained to higher-ups in the Roanoke Salvation Army. However, she was told that even though Moffitt’s behavior was out of line, she should just get back to work.

Moffitt has not commented publicly on the allegations in the Lisa McKinely suit, but even though the Roanoke Salvation Army has denied all of her charges, an earlier investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reveals that Moffitt admitted accusing McKinely of possessing a “Jezebel spirit.”

[Image: WDBJ-TV Screen Capture]