Housekeeper Nicky Diaz: Meg Whitman Treated Me Like a Piece of Garbage

Sept. 29, 2010 -- California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman today found herself battling allegations that she knowingly employed an undocumented immigrant housekeeper, failed to pay a portion of her wages and then fired her in an act of political damage control.

The charges come a little over a month before the November election.

At a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday organized by celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, Whitman's former housekeeper and nanny, Nicky Diaz, tearfully recounted how in June 2009 she was suddenly terminated by Whitman and her husband, Griffith Harsh, after she said she asked the couple for legal help to obtain U.S. citizenship. Allred also alleged that Whitman became aware of Diaz's undocumented status years earlier, but took no action.

Whitman said the "charges are without merit."

Diaz told reporters that just a few months before Whitman announced she was running for governor as a Republican, the former eBay CEO fired her after nine years spent cleaning the couple's 3,700-square-foot home in an upscale Northern California suburb and shuttling their children to and from school and appointments.

"From now on you don't know me and I don't know you," Diaz said Whitman told her in the summer of 2009. "I was shocked and hurt that Ms. Whitman would treat me this way after nine years. I realized at that moment that she didn't appreciate my work. I felt like she was throwing me away like a piece of garbage."

In a statement released on Wednesday, Whitman said, "Nicky had falsified the hiring documents and personal information she provided to the employment agency that brought her to us in 2000." The statement continued, "Nicky told me that she was admitting her deception now because she was aware that her lie might come out during the campaign."

In her statement, Whitman described Diaz as a "friend of our family" and a faithful employee who had to be fired once she confessed to being an illegal worker.

Whitman's campaign also provided an employment questionnaire Diaz filled out in 2000 in which she stated that she could legally accept work in the United States, as well as copies of immigration and W-4 forms, a California driver's license and a Social Security card all in Diaz's name.