Philadelphia City Hall in Downtown Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA – Another Philadelphia DEI officer has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the City, alleging she was retaliated against for “opposing and reporting discrimination and harassment.”
Brandee Anderson made that claim in a race-discrimination lawsuit filed July 27 in Philadelphia federal court against the City and officials like Mayor Cherelle Parker. Anderson is the second diversity, equity and inclusion chief to sue Philadelphia, as Leslie Marant sued last year over “the very sex discrimination she was hired to dismantle” in the Philadelphia Police Department.
Anderson, who now teaches Critical Race Studies at Drexel University, was hired as chief racial equity strategist in 2022 and claims she was terminated after filing a sexual harassment report. But with a new mayor, she was re-hired in October 2024 as chief DEI officer.
It wasn’t long before she was “undermined,” she said, by various officials within Philadelphia’s government. Anderson claims she was instructed to start building a case to fire Celena Morrison, the transgender executive director of the City’s LGBTQ+ Affairs department, and was accused of betraying the City by not doing so.
In February 2025, Anderson discovered a “blackface” caricature in Philadelphia’s newspaper but instead of addressing her concerns that it was problematic, the City “shifted to optics,” the suit says.
And when she asked for time off to attend a criminal hearing involving a woman Anderson alleged raped her, she was fired, the suit says.
“Between December 2024 and February 2025, the City engaged in a sustained effort to suppress diversity, equity and inclusion activity, including directives to ‘stand down,’ warnings not to ‘weaponize DEI against HR,’ a February 3, 2025, directive centralizing all public messaging under the City Solicitor, and a February 27, 2025, directive to rebrand DEI as ‘organizational effectiveness,’” the suit says.
Twenty days before she was fired, she received a report that deputy chief of staff Chris Dailey sent the director of LGBTQ+ Affairs a “sexual image,” the suit says. Anderson relayed the information from Tyrell Brown to HR, and Inspector General Alex DeSantis conducted witness interviews.
But Anderson says she was targeted in the aftermath, including her being relieved of a spot on a public speaking panel on July 15, 2025. She was fired a week after that due to “judgment lapses” in the handling of the complaint, the suit says.
“Ms. Anderson never possessed or distributed the sexual image,” the complaint says. She reported the matter to Human Resources. Chris Dailey, who actually sent the sexual image, is white.
“Mr. Dailey was not terminated… Ms. Anderson and Brown, both Black, were terminated, while Mr. Dailey, who is white and who actually sent the image, kept his job.”
An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer days later quoted Parker’s director of communications as saying, “We vehemently disagree with many of the former employee’s allegations and outright misstatements of fact.” A later radio interview quoted the same official as saying, “Ms. Anderson’s description of the photograph as unsolicited was not correct.”
Christopher Macey Jr. of Bell & Bell represents Anderson.
