ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — A Polk County-based Grand Jury tasked with investigating Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell’s first run in office was looking into accusations she and her deputies systemically failed to preserve and destroyed documents that belonged to taxpayers, according to a filing by an investigator connected to the case.
The lawsuit by Eric Edwards, who was tasked with overseeing administrative investigations at the 9th Circuit State Attorney’s office, said he was investigating a series of policy violations that spanned from 2017 to 2023.
That period included both Worrell’s tenure as well as several years when the office was run by her predecessor, Aramis Ayala.
Edwards claimed Worrell’s former Chief of Staff, Keisha Mulfort, stored public records belonging to the office on a private Gmail account, and deleted the records when she was let go from the office after Gov. DeSantis suspended Worrell in 2023.
He said a subsequent investigation also uncovered that Worrell, Mulfort and others intentionally did not preserve public records at Worrell’s instruction.
All of this, he said, was turned over to the Grand Jury at the request of the prosecutor, Marion-Lake State Attorney Bill Gladson, who refused to comment as he walked into the Polk County courthouse the day Worrell was questioned in January.
Edwards’ filing said the investigation concluded in April, and neither Worrell, Mulfort nor anyone else in the office was ultimately indicted.
That was around the time WFTV began asking for records related to the Grand Jury’s work that should have become public. To this day, prosecutors have rejected requests for those records.
It’s still not clear why a Polk County-based Grand Jury was needed, including whether any of the violations involved Polk County-connected cases.
Mulfort did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Worrell did not directly address the specific accusations Edwards investigated in her statement, instead broadly responding to those as well as his lawsuit’s claim she leaked his phone number to a reporter.
“Unsurprisingly it is everything we anticipated - another partisan witch hunt led by disgruntled political rivals still bitter about the outcome of the last election,” she wrote. “The State Attorney looks forward to thoroughly responding to these baseless and false allegations while continuing to do the job she was resoundingly re-elected to do.”
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