Former COVID data manager Rebekah Jones won’t be getting her old job back, nor will she receive back pay from the Department that terminated her.

Judge Angela C. Dempsey of the 2nd Judicial Circuit granted a motion for summary judgment this week to the Department of Health (DOH) and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. She ruled that former DOH Deputy Secretary Shamariel Roberson, also a named defendant in a suit filed by Jones, did not violate Jones’ First Amendment rights by firing her in May 2020.

In a 20-page order, Dempsey dismissed all claims against the Department, Ladapo and Roberson. She concluded Jones did not qualify for whistleblower protections because she participated in publishing COVID data she later said was misleading and “therefore ‘committed or intentionally participated in committing the violation or suspected violation for which protections (under the Federal Whistleblower Act were) sought.’”

The anonymous X account, Max Nordau, first flagged the decision Thursday.

The ruling by Dempsey, who was appointed to the bench by ex-Gov. Jeb Bush, marks another legal defeat for Jones. In December 2022, just over a month after losing a congressional race against now-former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, Jones admitted to illegally accessing Florida’s computer system in an agreement with prosecutors that required her to pay $20,000, perform 150 hours of community service and attend mental health counseling in exchange for serving no prison time.

That ruling came seven months after a state Inspector General’s investigation into Jones’ allegations that she was fired for refusing to manipulate state COVID data concluded that her claims were “unfounded” or “unsubstantiated.”

Dempsey agreed with that assessment.

“After careful consideration of the motion papers, and the pertinent legal standards, the Court finds that there are no genuine disputes of material fact regarding the nature of the Plaintiff’s speech or the legitimate, non-retaliatory reason for her termination,” the Judge wrote.

“The evidence unequivocally demonstrates the Plaintiff’s termination was based on documented insubordination, including unauthorized communications with external entities that violated Department policies, and unauthorized disclosures that disrupted the Department’s ability to maintain data integrity and public trust during a public health crisis.”

Jones, whom Forbes named its 2020 Technology Person of the Year, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars since her firing. She was granted whistleblower status by DOH Inspector General Michael Bennett in May 2021, five months after police raided her home in response to an unauthorized login at the Department’s emergency communications system.

She denied involvement and asked for criminal charges against her to be dropped. They weren’t. Jones sued the Florida Department of Law Enforcement over the raid, but later dropped the complaint.

Dempsey’s order cites testimony from Craig Curry, an IT Director at DOH, who said he became aware in April 2020 of since-deleted Facebook posts Jones made in which she identified herself as the person who maintained the state’s COVID dashboard and discussed the logic behind what was displayed on it.

Curry said he subsequently learned Jones had given an interview to DOH geographic information services vendor ESRI in which she discussed her COVID dashboard work and that she’d also published a blog post representing herself as the author of the COVID dashboard, displaying charts of DOH data she had created.

This was done without DOH approval, Curry said.

Jones testified that later the same month, Roberson told her to falsify some counties’ COVID positivity percentages to 10% so that Gov. Ron DeSantis could follow through on his plan to reopen most Florida counties. Jones refused and later resisted other changes to the dashboard she considered misleading. She did, however, admit to publishing new case positivity rates and data DOH gave her.

“Notwithstanding Roberson’s alleged directive,” Dempsey wrote, “there is no evidence that any COVID-19 data was ever falsified.”

On May 5, 2020, Dempsey’s order said, Roberson, Epidemiology Division Director Carina Blackmore and “several other epidemiologists” became concerned about Jones’ public posting. She was publishing both DOH data and information related to on-Florida resident deaths through the Open Data hub, an open-source site the state operates as a repository for disease-tracking information.

Jones was told to temporarily take the hub down. She resisted. The next day, she was removed from the dashboard project. The day after that, “Jones made changes to the dashboard files and removed several team members’ administrative software rights, which hindered their ability to do their jobs and contributed to the Dashboard malfunctioning,” Dempsey wrote.

“Curry instructed Jones to correct the administrative privileges for her colleagues and directed her not to ‘impede’ work with the Dashboard. … It is undisputed that Jones never complied, and that Curry had to contact the software vendor directly to get the privileges reinstated.”

After several email exchanges with Curry in which Jones questioned the abilities of her replacements, she was fired May 18, 2020. Two months later, she filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations alleging whistleblower retaliation. She then accessed a DOH database without authorization and was subsequently arrested.

Jones, 35, has other legal woes aside from her issues with DOH. In June 2023, she pleaded no contest to cyberstalking a former boyfriend with whom she’d had an affair in 2017, when she was his married professor. Police cited a lengthy document Jones published online that included texts and nude photographs of the man.

Prosecutors had previously dropped another set of charges involving the same man, including felony robbery, trespass and contempt of court for violating a domestic violence injunction.

In April 2023, police arrested Jones’ teenage son for allegedly threatening to shoot up a middle school. Police and multiple Navarre schoolmates of the boy, identified as J.J. in court documents, said he’d spoken of planning to shoot and stab students.

Jones said her son had merely shared memes about school shootings and intimated that police interest in the boy and his subsequent arrest were retaliation for the whistleblower lawsuit she filed March 13, 2023.

Santa Rosa County Judge Steven Warrick sentenced J.J., who pleaded no contest, to indefinite probation until he turned 19, ordering the boy to do community service, write an essay, undergo therapy, adhere to a curfew and make better life choices.

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