Dems give politically connected judge six-figure gig she’s too obese to do
Political deals don’t get any dirtier than this.
Members of the all-Democratic City Council in suburban White Plains rewarded their party’s well-connected chairwoman with a plum six-figure judicial seat — even though she was too sickly to work, critics charge.
City Judge Elizabeth Shollenberger — who suffers from a digestive disorder and morbid obesity, among other ailments — was unable to climb the three steps to her courtroom bench, even with the help of a specially installed railing, sources said.
City Judicial Review Committee member Mark Elliott has publicly accused Mayor Tom Roach of making sure “the fix was in” for the judge, who had been his campaign treasurer.
“She came to the interview with an oxygen tank. She’s very fragile,” Elliott told The Post.
“No reasonable person could have looked at her as I did and thought that she could finish her 10-year term.”
The committee rejected the Yale Law School grad, 61, for appointment to the post.
But she got the job anyway, and promptly went on the first of several medical leaves just a week after being sworn in to her $175,500-a-year job.
The job also provides $65,000 worth of annual health benefits, which the currently hospitalized Shollenberger has been putting to good use.
Aside from the alleged cronyism, court workers were also troubled by a more immediate concern — a severe gastric distress problem that made itself apparent on the few occasions the judge made it into court.
“She would come in and we would see the diarrhea running down her leg and to the floor,” one court worker said. “She would soil the chair and then ask for a new one.”
Another court worker said Shollenberger astounded staffers by acting with “complete arrogance” following the awful accidents.
“She would just say, ‘There is a mess over there. I think someone should clean it up,’ ” the source said.
Council member Milagros Lecuona, who’s challenging Roach for the mayoralty this year, said he engineered Shollenberger’s Dec. 20 appointment “to make sure he’d have the support of the chair of the Democratic Party” for his re-election bid.
Shollenberger was succeeded as the party’s head by her husband, Tim James.
“If I knew what I know now, I would not have voted to support her,” Lecuona said. “This is going to be a big problem for the taxpayers. It’s financially very irresponsible.”
Shollenberger told The Post from her bed in White Plains Hospital Thursday: “I have no intention of retiring. I want to work. I want to be a judge. Judges get sick all the time.”
She declined to discuss her condition, but her husband said Shollenberger has pulmonary hypertension.
He also called the complaints from courthouse staffers a “grotesque distortion” and “hysterical overreaction to what was a minor health incident.”
Roach’s spokeswoman called the claims about Shollenberger’s appointment “quite a conspiracy theory,” adding: “I would dispute all of that.”
Following the courthouse staffer complaints about Shollenberger’s incontinence, the state Office of Court Administration determined she was “unable to perform her job,” a high-level court source said.
On May 2, Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence K. Marks signed an order transferring all of her cases to other jurists, and preventing her from being assigned any others without permission.
“The situation remains under review,” OCA spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.
Additional reporting by Bruce Golding
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