Chavis, through his attorney, denies the charges brought by Mary Stansel, who served as his deputy for just five weeks until he fired her in the spring of 1993. But an out-of-court settlement, reached last November and first reported last week by The New York Times, shows that Chavis was willing to pay big money for her silence. It called for two payments totaling $50,000 and six monthly installments of $5,400. Stansel, a former aide to Alabama Sen. Howell Heflin, who helped Chavis campaign for his NAACP post, has received just $77,000. But under the pact, she stood to collect $250,000 more unless Chavis found her a federal job within six months.
When he couldn’t find her a spot, Chavis tried to renegotiate. Stansel responded in June with a lawsuit alleging breach of contract and infliction of emotional distress. She also accused Chavis of sexual harassment but provided no details, and declined to comment last week. Abbey Hairston, Chavis’s attorney, says the original settlement makes no mention of sexual harassment, and covered only “employment disputes” and civil-rights violations. Asked why Chavis agreed to the deal, Hairston said, “In his mind, he had no choice. It was either sign or go through exactly what he’s going through now.”
Conservatives on the NAACP board, unhappy with Chavis before the case leaked out last week, will certainly attempt to oust him. Board chairman William Gibson defended him last week, arguing that Chavis acted within his “executive authority” to settle the matter. Gibson, who engineered Chavis’s narrow election by the board to the executive director’s post last year, has yet to say when he first learned of the settlement or the subsequent lawsuit. At a July 13 board meeting – two weeks after the suit was filed – members say both men flatly stated that there were no pending legal claims. Some members fear that unless they move quickly to change the leadership, the NAACP’s fund raising, reportedly flagging since Chavis welcomed Farrakhan to a black-leadership summit earlier this year, will continue to decline. “If they prolong it . . . our credibility will be nil at the end of this and the donors will walk away from us,” said one insider. Whatever the outcome, Chavis, who set out to rejuvenate the NAACP, has instead dealt it a painful blow.
