A clerk assigned to the domestic violence courtroom in the south-suburban Markham courthouse filed a battery complaint against a judge previously accused of misconduct, telling Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department detectives the judge had pushed him away from his computer.
According to a report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the clerk alleged that Cook County Circuit Judge Ruth Gudino had pushed him “hard enough for him to lose his balance” after becoming frustrated with the pace of his work.
The clerk also wrote a date-stamped memo about the alleged July 16 incident and reported it to Markham’s presiding judge, Tommy Brewer.
The sheriff’s office detective who investigated the case requested it be classified as “unfounded.” No charges have been filed against Gudino.
This month, after Injustice Watch began asking questions about the incident, Brewer reassigned Gudino from Markham’s domestic violence courtroom to a “floater” role in the courthouse, effective Sept. 22.
Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans is also appointing a peer mentor to support Gudino, according to a spokesperson for his office.
Gudino did not respond to Injustice Watch’s request for comment. She did not speak to detectives, either. But in a statement to the sheriff’s office, Gudino’s attorney, Todd Pugh, wrote that Gudino “made no physical contact to [the clerk] at any time.”
According to Pugh’s letter, Gudino claimed the clerk “struggled with high-volume courtrooms.” On the day of the incident, Pugh wrote, Gudino asked the clerk multiple times to print a document.
“Frustrated, she told him to leave the computer screen up and step away so she could print it herself,” Pugh wrote.
This is not the first time Gudino, who was elected in 2022, has been accused of inappropriate physical contact with colleagues.
Shortly before the election, Injustice Watch reported that during her tenure as a county prosecutor, Gudino had been reported by her supervisor for alleged unwanted touching, bullying, and other workplace misconduct.
In a 2018 memo to his superiors at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Dan Groth, then a supervising Cook County assistant state’s attorney at the Maywood courthouse, wrote that Gudino had “engaged in unwanted touching of several” fellow prosecutors. “This includes unwanted contact with the lower back, shoulders, waist areas, and pants pocket areas,” Groth wrote. He also described an incident in which Gudino allegedly encouraged a female assistant state’s attorney “to wear more revealing clothing in the bust area,” and another in which Gudino “tugged or pulled” a prosecutor’s ear and “wrapped her hands around another [assistant state’s attorney]’s neck to simulate strangling him.”
Gudino denied the allegations, and the state’s attorney’s office said they were “unsubstantiated.”
In a 2022 statement, Gudino told Injustice Watch, “I have never engaged in inappropriate behavior, either professionally or personally. … I have never been subject to an investigation for misconduct because there has never been a credible allegation lodged because nothing ever happened.”
Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Mariyana Spyropoulos declined to comment on the alleged incident with the clerk.
Teamsters Local 700, the union that represents circuit court clerks, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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