Book

Against the Current: Retaliation, Resilience, and Reform is a narrative expression of courage — a journey through systemic resistance toward personal and institutional transformation. It is both testimony and teaching, revealing how coherence restores integrity.

When I joined NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, I believed I was stepping into a life of service — protecting marine ecosystems, advancing science, and working for the public good. Instead, I found myself swept into a hidden current: a culture where abuse was tolerated, retaliation was weaponized, and silence was enforced at every level.

The breaking point came when I learned a pornographic video of me had been created without my consent, digitally enhanced, and circulated within my workplace. What should have been investigated as a crime was instead used to humiliate and control me. When I reported it, the retaliation began: my access was revoked, my reputation was smeared, my work was sabotaged, and I was removed from service.

I turned to the system designed to protect whistleblowers — the Merit Systems Protection Board. But as my appeal reached their desk, the Board collapsed into a quorum gap, leaving my case, and hundreds of others, indefinitely frozen. Justice was not denied outright. It was simply stalled into silence.

Against the Current: Retaliation, Resilience, and Reform is my story of fighting back — documenting abuse, refusing to be erased, and pushing for reforms to protect whistleblowers and children. It is both deeply personal and urgently political: a memoir of survival, and a call to action against the systems that enable abuse when they fail to hold power accountable.