Hutchison says GOP official urged run for Senate

A new batch of unsealed records from Susan Hutchison's discrimination lawsuit against KIRO-TV did not contain any startling news and mostly added details to what was reported last week about her rift with station superiors.

A King County Superior Court judge Monday released 400 pages from the 2003 lawsuit filed by Hutchison, who is now running for King County executive.

Hutchison's suit charged KIRO with age and race discrimination after she was replaced as evening news anchor by a younger, Asian-American woman, Kristy Lee. The suit was settled in 2005.

Monday's records are expected to be the last installment released. Among the new details:

• In a deposition, Hutchison said the late U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, a Republican, had asked her to run against U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat. Hutchison also said the head of the Republican Party in King County had asked her to run for Seattle mayor.

• She believed KIRO executives were out to get her when she was suspended for a week without pay in July 2002. The suspension came after Hutchison was denied a vacation request over the Fourth of July holiday, called in sick and went on a vacation to Bend, Ore., with her husband.

"I was deeply humiliated and punished beyond belief for taking two sick days and there was a hatred there among the news director and the general manager," she said in a deposition.

Hutchison was assigned work she didn't know how to do, she said, "to make me a spectacle so that they could write me up every day for what I could not accomplish ... they wanted me gone, period."

KIRO officials maintained in the records that they demoted Hutchison because of low ratings.

She took medical leave Sept. 19, 2002 — and never returned to work before she was fired Dec. 20 — because she was "totally stressed out" by her situation at KIRO.

• Hutchison called the mother of a college student who wanted to intern at KIRO and told her the station would be a bad environment for her daughter. The student's mother, according to a sworn statement, found the call from Hutchison — whom she had never met — "strange."

Hutchison alleged that John Woodin, then KIRO's general manager, was a "sexual predator" and had a "drug problem," according to the mother. Her daughter went ahead and worked at KIRO in the summer of 2002 and told her parents she "had no problems with John Woodin and had seen nothing to corroborate the accusations made by Susan Hutchison."

Staff reporter Michael J. Berens contributed to this report.

Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com