Homeless woman sued NYC Council candidate Hailie Kim for unpaid wage despite attempts by Kim to pay her
Hailie Kim, a Democratic Socialist running for a City Council seat in Queens, was sued last year for allegedly stiffing a homeless woman on her salary — but Kim provided the Daily News with records last week showing she tried multiple times to pay the woman, who seemingly refused to accept the cash.
The peculiar dispute started after the woman, Cecilia Gullas, signed up to work for Kim’s unsuccessful 2021 campaign for the 26th Council District.
Kim, who’s running for the same western Queens Council district in this month’s Democratic primary, sent a $305 check on June 23, 2021, to Gullas to compensate her for passing out flyers to voters at a Woodside poll site the day before, according to a copy provided by Kim.
But Gullas never cashed the check — and nearly a year later, on May 18, 2022, she filed a lawsuit in Queens Civil Court claiming Kim never paid her for the poll site work, records obtained by The News show.
In her suit, Gullas described herself as homeless and said she lived in a Manhattan shelter. She claimed she had been subjected to “discrimination due to other workers being paid on the night of the election” and asked a judge to award her damages, in addition to the unpaid salary, because of the “emotional distress” caused by the alleged nonpayment.
The lawsuit prompted a Queens Civil Court judge to order Kim in October 2022 to cough up the wages she had owed Gullas for well over a year at that point, records show. The judge also ordered Kim to cover Gullas’ legal expenses.
Kim campaign spokeswoman Rebecca Harshbarger confirmed this past Thursday that Kim paid a total of $350 to Gullas via a money order as demanded by the judge.
But Harshbarger also said Gullas’ lawsuit was confounding because Kim tried to pay her three separate times before she went to court.
“[Gullas] refused three times to deposit the checks that the campaign gave her,” Harshbarger said.
Harshbarger shared an email Gullas sent Kim in August 2022 in which she wrote she did not want to cash one of the checks she had received because she was worried her bank account “will be levied with a fine.”
“I decided not to cash it. It is not good for my checking account to have a bad check,” Gullas wrote in the Aug. 15 message.
Harshbarger said Gullas’ concerns were unfounded because Kim’s campaign account had plenty of money in it at the time.
Reached over email, Gullas, who remains homeless, said she took legal action because she claimed a manager at her local bank declined to cash the first check she received from Kim’s campaign due to it being “not good.”
“I no longer wanted to go to another round of going to the bank to see if her check is good or not, so I just decided to go to [court],” Gullas wrote. “The judge ordered that I get paid, and Hailie abided by that order and paid me promptly.”
On Dec. 10, 2022, weeks after paying Gullas, Kim launched her second campaign for the 26th District, which covers Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside. The primary election in that race is set for June 27.
The 26th district has been represented since last year by Democratic Councilwoman Julie Won, who beat Kim and several other candidates in the 2021 election.
Kim, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an ex-English professor at Hunter College, has made combating homelessness a key part of her campaign this year.
“This is the worst homeless crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression, and New Yorkers need decisive action immediately from our political leadership,” she tweeted last month along with a link to her housing plan, which includes support for “Good Cause” eviction protections.
Eugene Noh, Won’s husband and campaign manager, declined to comment on Gullas’ lawsuit.
