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“We should always have each other’s backs.” A conversation with a survivor
On Monday, February 23, we broke the story that New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office deputy Dennis L. McCall had been fired and was under investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation. The story came out of several tips I’d received about McCall, including some seriously concerning allegations that he had been sexually harassing domestic violence victims — both men and women — whose cases he’d been assigned to or heard about through the Sheriff’s Office.
Because it’s an active investigation, NHCSO, SBI, and the District Attorney’s office were all tight-lipped. Beyond confirming that McCall’s was under investigation for misconduct, they offered no details. Currently, McCall has not been charged with any crime. I have not been able to independently confirm any allegations against McCall beyond the documented, but vague, policy violations for which he was fired.
On Tuesday, Port City Daily published a story about a young woman who alleged McCall had been assigned to her domestic violence case and that he had displayed increasingly unprofessional behavior, starting with text messages and escalating to touching her inappropriately. Because of the nature of her case, she’d shared intimate details about her life with McCall; she claimed he exploited that relationship to harass her.
Identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, the woman told PCD that she’d filed a complaint with the SBI that seems to have led, at least in part, to the investigation and McCall’s termination; she also said she’d been contacted by other people who claimed they had been harassed by McCall. The woman went on to speak with WWAY, which ran a piece on Wednesday, including screenshots of texts she said were from McCall.
On Thursday, I got a chance to speak with the young woman, both about her ordeal with McCall and her experience since speaking out.
She shared the story with me that she’d previously told PCD and WWAY, noting that McCall started “pushing boundaries” from the beginning. And she noted that she was in a bad place to manage the inappropriateness.
“He was texting creepy things, and I wasn’t really setting boundaries, because as a sexual trauma victim and survivor, especially still being in an active domestic violence case, it’s hard to set boundaries with people, you kind of let shit slide that you shouldn’t let slide,” she said. Still, eventually pushed back and tried to set some boundaries.
She told me she blocked McCall’s phone number on several occasions, but would unblock him in order to talk about her case. Ultimately, that led to a situation where McCall came to her house to pick up a piece of digital evidence that she’d been unable to email because of the file size. While she said there was “absolutely nothing sexual about it,” she said McCall ripped her phone out of her hand and was scrolling through personal photos. Then, she says, McCall reached inside her sweater and touched her breast.
She told me she kicked McCall out and again blocked his number. She didn’t file a complaint, but a few weeks afterward, McCall was taken off her case. Despite that, he continued to contact her, texting from a new phone number, on Super Bowl Sunday, February 8. She ultimately told McCall to leave her alone and blocked the new number. She also posted about McCall’s texts on Facebook.
The next day, February 9, she took formal action, and things moved pretty quickly. After calling around to the FBI and NHCSO’s Internal Affairs, she was eventually directed to the SBI.
“The SBI calls me maybe an hour later, two hours later, and then they're at my house, another two hours later. Two SBI agents came to my house, I think one was FBI, one was SBI, if I'm correct, and they were super kind. I was definitely in hysterics when they got here,” she told me, saying the experience was surreal. (I reached out to the Charlotte FBI office; they did not confirm if their agency was involved.)
Two days later, McCall was fired. And two weeks after that, we published our initial report. Though she’s remained anonymous, she was prepared for backlash, in part because after her initial post about McCall on Facebook, some commenters had accused her of lying and saying the texts she’d shared were fake.
“I’ve seen some posts, and I’ve gotten a lot of support, and I’m shocked,” she said, noting that even in notoriously toxic comment sections, there was a lot of support for her. “I’m really grateful for it — because it really could have gone the other way.”
She showed me several screenshots of comments from other people sharing bad experiences with McCall, some of whom felt empowered to speak out because of the press coverage of her story this week. She said one woman shared an experience from March of 2025, indicating to her that the misconduct had been going on for some time.
“It seems like a lot of other women and men experienced Dennis McCall in a negative way, and it seems like people just really want justice,” she told me. “It kind of feels like I was the start of something that’s going to expose the New Hanover Sheriff's Department. It starts with leadership, and that’s who I plan to go after.”
I asked her if she felt her issue ultimately landed on the desk of Sheriff Ed McMahon himself.
“100% — because Dennis McCall got demoted last year for the same exact reason as my case,” she said, referencing McCall’s demotion in November. The paperwork for the demotion from detective to master deputy noted misconduct, but didn’t offer details. She believes it was due to an incident similar to hers.
She told me she’d had past experiences with the Wilmington Police Department and Sheriff’s Office, and “they have been incredible.” But she expressed frustration that, in her view, “leadership is letting the bad cops get away [with it], and the only way it’s gonna stop is if they stop getting a slap on the wrist like a little kid.”
She referred to the Sheriff’s Office statement to PCD that deputies go through rigorous training to prepare for domestic violence cases.
“They need discipline, I mean, I went through more training than most police as a cosmetologist, which I think is just insane,” she said.
(Becoming a fully-licensed cosmetologist in North Carolina requires 1,500 hours of training. Basic law enforcement training is an 868-hour course, although that doesn’t include additional professional development training provided by law enforcement agencies.)
For now, she’s considering her legal options. If there are other victims, and she believes strongly that there are, she hopes there could be a civil case — and that the SBI and the courts hold McCall accountable.
“And again, I don't think money is justice. So hopefully we can all work together and put him where he belongs,” she said.
I’ve covered many stories of people in power — teachers, law enforcement officers, elected officials, and business executives — who abused their position to prey on people. Sometimes, victims are bullied, intimidated, or otherwise leveraged into silence, but all too often, abusers rely on the scary prospect of going public to keep their victims from speaking up. The fear that they won’t be believed, that the uncomfortable and sometimes messy details of their personal lives will become fodder for ridicule, is often enough to keep people from ever saying anything.
That wasn’t the case this time. So I asked her what advice she might have for people in similar situations.
“My best advice would be, if you've dealt with harassment from a cop or law enforcement, it's very important for people to send in complaints to internal affairs and complaints to the New Hanover Sheriff's Office,” she said. “I would honestly keep calling the FBI in Charlotte. You literally just Google the FBI in Charlotte.”
Speaking out is not easy. It can take a long time to process the impact of harassment and abuse. There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty. It’s daunting. Even the vitriolic divisiveness of politics can sometimes get in the way. The young woman I spoke to this week said she hopes that, with support from the community, survivors of any type of abuse can overcome those obstacles.
“Whether it takes you a year to come out or two years to come out, trauma is a real thing, and grief and guilt are a real thing. If it takes you two years to come out, that's okay, but we should always have each other's back, and especially women in this country, with the state of things right now, it's so important that we as women and womanhood stick together,” she told me. “I feel like it's really needed that we all can support each other, because I had some woman hating on the Facebook page and doubting me, which is just so batshit. So I think if we can all come together and not be divided by politics, but come together for the real issues, we're going to thrive as a community. We're going to thrive as a community, and we'll be 10 times stronger as a whole.”
Editor's notes: The lawsuit against Wilmington, Novant's new dashboard, and the NHCS settlement
Lawsuit against Wilmington: This week, the City of Wilmington’s former DEI director, Kimberly Carson, filed a federal lawsuit alleging that she was unlawfully fired after she called attention to a host of racially charged issues.
You can find a recap of the case here: Former Wilmington DEI director alleges wrongful termination, systemic racism, and other issues in city government
Carson’s claims include that the $75,000 investigation into the Wilmington Police Department and then-Chief Donny Williams was biased, unwarranted, and dishonestly explained by city officials, who Carson claims didn’t reveal that a full third of the cost went toward investigating an unnamed high-profile Black female city employee.
Carson also makes several claims about Deputy City Manager Mary Vigue, whom many will remember from the legal comedy of errors that allowed her to avoid prosecution for a DWI (which, notably, took place during work hours and led to an unpaid suspension). Carson claims this was not a one-off, and that Vigue was drunk, at work or at work functions, on more than one occasion, including the claim that the day before her DWI, Vigue “passed out and was found by another City employee in some bushes.”
The lawsuit is generally shot through with some very bold claims, and while I’m not an attorney, I can reasonably guess that Carson’s attorney, Gary Shipman, will have a lot of work to do in supporting them. But, in the process, I do wonder if we’ll learn more about both the Vigue case and the investigation into Williams and WPD. The final report from that investigation was never made public, despite some closed-door debate by city council, I’ve long argued that releasing the report is in the best interest of the public. If it was a racially motivated hatchet job on Williams, people should be able to see that. And if it reveals damning evidence about dysfunction beyond WPD — which I’ve heard it might — then the public should see that too.
I also wonder about the lawsuit’s description of the city administration as an “incredibly dysfunctional group.” Carson’s suit is largely focused on systemic racism — including racial discrimination and stereotyping aimed at her personally — but it gestures at broader issues, including covering up bad behavior and a hesitancy for HR to take appropriate action.
It’s hard for me not to see some connections between Carson’s claims — based on her experiences from May of 2024 to May of 2025 — and what’s been going on since the arrival of Becky Hawke, the city’s newest city manager. Arriving shortly after Carson was fired, Hawke’s tenure has seen the departure of at least five top employees, including two who were recently fired. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it seems increasingly like Hawke is cleaning house. Perhaps this lawsuit will bring some of that to light, as well.
Novant’s new dashboard: In last week’s edition, I wrote at length about Novant’s five-year update, which they presented to New Hanover County commissioners in mid-February. I touched on the ongoing disparity between ratings from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the nonprofit watchdog Leapfrog, and what Novant says are the current conditions at NHRMC right now. The issue is the available data lags, sometimes by a year or even five years.
To that end, last November, Novant promised to create an online dashboard, showing what NHRMC President Laurie Whalin said would be “real-time data.”
I neglected to mention in last week’s column that Novant had actually published that dashboard, and while I updated the web version, for those of you who missed it, I wanted to make a note of it and apologize for the oversight.
That said, the dashboard is underwhelming. Novant’s definition of “real time” is definitely different from what I had imagined. It’s not any kind of daily, weekly, or even a monthly ticker of safety and quality data. It does provide information that is more recent than what had been available before — and that’s good — but if I’m honest, “real-time” is a stretch.
The dashboard also contains just a few of the many safety and quality metrics that go into hospital ratings, though Novant says it will add more information over time.
Notably, the dashboard shows two areas where patient-reported metrics are considerably below where Novant has said it wants to be: whether patients considered the hospital clean and whether they would recommend it. These scores were not part of Novant’s presentation to commissioners.
Asked about this, a Novant spokesperson noted that hospital officials had “15 minutes to cover five years,” adding the presentation had a QR code leading to the new dashboard. Still, given that Novant has recently switched janitorial service providers twice in the last year or so, I would have expected Novant to touch on it, and if not, I would’ve expected at least one of the county commissioners to ask about it — but neither ended up being the case.
You can read more about what is, and isn’t, included in the dashboard here: New Novant NHRMC landing page data shows a mixed bag of improving and subpar scores
Again, I regret the omission of the dashboard in last week’s column, and certainly, if Novant builds it out, it would help ground the conversation about hospital quality at NHRMC in more recent data — instead of potentially outdated ratings and anecdotes, which are often hard to verify. But right now, I have to say that it continues to leave significant gaps in our ability to trust but verify.
NHCS settlement: One last note here on the way out, about this week’s announcement that New Hanover County Schools had settled, through its insurance company, with the remaining plaintiffs (and one prospective plaintiff) in the civil case filed against the district and convicted child abuser Michael Earl Kelly.
The $640,000 settlement comes eight years after Kelly was arrested, but it’s worth remembering that Kelly was just one of many cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by NHCS employees. In several cases, there was damning evidence that the district didn’t do enough to react to early warnings — including the case of Peter Michael Frank, whose victims still have a pending civil suit against NHCS.
I’m working on a column about this for next week, including talking to some of the people who helped push the district — slowly but surely — towards some measure of accountability, as well as sitting down with the current administration to discuss their efforts to prevent something like the Kelly or Frank abuses from happening again.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the issue. As I wrote on Facebook, “Where are we now? Has trust been restored, wholly or in part? Was justice served? How do you feel, eight years after Kelly’s arrest?”
