MINNEAPOLIS — As details of an internal investigation into St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her have emerged over the past week, so has a central question: Does the conduct amount to sexual harassment, or is Her’s personality being weaponized in a public fight with the St. Paul Police Department?

So far, the allegations against Her include that she superimposed the face of a police officer onto a meme about “weinering” in relation to a hot dog gathering with top brass in the department; initiated a conversation about her own breasts and the breasts of a deputy chief in the police locker room; made performative sexualized noises while working out; pasted images of herself over photographs of high-ranking officers in department headquarters; superimposed the faces of some St. Paul police officers, including Chief Axel Henry, onto the bodies of UFC fighters; and sent sexualized communications and made unwanted physical contact directed at Henry.

Her has said that some of her “attempts at humor” fell flat, but she also said the jokes reflected her belief that the police force had welcomed her into their circle and then manipulated that trust.

“The way this is being portrayed in the media does not reflect what I understood to be mutual communication,” Her said last week.

That the allegations have become public months after the complaint was filed but less than three weeks before Her is set to unveil her budget proposal for 2027 have some questioning the connection between the investigation and Her’s scrutiny of the police budget.

St. Paul faces a $26 million budget gap, and Her has signaled she intends to make cuts across the city. Those cuts potentially include the police department, which was typically shielded from austerity during former Mayor Melvin Carter’s tenure.

But disagreements with the police department extend beyond the budget.

Her’s administration has pressed the department to make public a timeline of decisions around the police response to an ICE raid on the city’s East Side in November 2025, which saw city officers use chemical irritants and less-lethal munitions on protesters and journalists.

Though Her has said she will not call for an outside investigation into the incident before the conclusion of the internal affairs probe, she wrote that she would welcome the city’s civilian review board to develop a policy to hire an outside investigator.

When Her came into office, she made an effort to connect with city workers: patching potholes with a public works crew, visiting the firefighters’ training facility and learning how to suit up and hold a hose, and working out with police officers in their gym.

A person familiar with Her and the police department but not allowed to comment publicly on the situation, said the relationship started souring before Henry filed the complaint and that Her stopped going to the police gym in January.

That same person said the Photoshop incidents are believed to have taken place either right before Her took office or early in her term, as she was trying to establish relationships.

Ryan Winkler, a former state lawmaker who served as majority leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives first met Her in 2018. Winkler said that Her presents as a breath of fresh air in politics because “she is a fully formed human and not a caricature of a person or a play-acting leader.” That includes making the kind of jokes that lots of people make.

Winkler believes the allegations against Her could be a calculated move to leverage the mayor’s personality and undermine her authority in office.

“I think she probably felt when she was starting in this new role that she wanted to connect with the police; it’s a huge part of what the city does,” Winkler said.

“She has a great sense of humor. She’s funny as hell. She loves to laugh. She loves to find a way to connect. She cares about the things that you care about. A lot of those things can be quite personal and I do think they were probably used against her.”

Henry’s attorney, Chris Madel, has repeatedly pushed back against claims that the complaint filed with the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office on April 1 is related to anything other than Henry protecting his staff from being sexually harassed by the mayor.

He emphasized that during the course of two formal interviews with Henry, conducted between April 1 and June 30, investigators from Resolute Law never once asked the chief about disagreements with Her related to federal immigration enforcement actions or pending St. Paul budget cuts.

The only conflict between the leaders specifically broached during the investigation, Madel said, centered around the massive overtime hours being racked up by Her’s driver, which Henry considered excessive.

Madel also critiqued the response to the allegations as a double standard, arguing that if a female police officer had brought these kind of accusations against a male mayor, no one would question the motive.

“The mayor still has not done anything to explain her whackadoodle conduct.”

One factor complicating the narrative around Her’s alleged behavior is the different legal calculus for how sexual harassment allegations are determined in the workplace.

The investigation into Her is internal, likely focused on the policies in place for St. Paul employees. That standard is different than what Minnesota courts consider in civil litigation, like a lawsuit.

In the letter Madel wrote that the city was “on notice that Mayor Her has engaged in illegal conduct” toward city employees and that future litigation was reasonably foreseeable.

Anne Bolgert, a Minneapolis employment lawyer, said both employers and juries have to determine what is sexual harassment in a workplace environment.

“In Minnesota case law and Minnesota statutes, which would apply to this, it seems, there’s a subjective aspect to these kinds of claims and there’s also an objective aspect to it,” Bolgert said.

The subjective aspect would be whether the alleged subject of the harassment felt it was offensive, hostile or undesirable to them. The objective standard is more strictly encoded, legally.

“It’s ‘Would a reasonable person in this scenario understand this conduct to be severe or pervasive?’” Bolgert said. “That severe or pervasive threshold is the standard in Minnesota for whether the conduct could be sexual harassment.”

Bolgert acknowledged that the courts have said the definition of severe or pervasive should evolve over time, but the standard remains.

“It’s hard to say very concretely what does or does not rise to that standard in any given scenario,” she said.

Bolgert also said there is typically a difference between internal investigations and civil or criminal filings. Internal investigations often focus on internal policies.

The City of St. Paul’s Workplace Conduct Policy lists several examples of sexual harassment as prohibited including sharing “sexually explicit images, videos, texts, emails, messages and phone calls.”

On top of that, sexual comments that are “considered unacceptable by another individual” are prohibited and can include comments about an individual’s body that go “beyond mere courtesy.” The policy also prohibits dirty jokes that are part of social media posts, tweets or memes.

The fact that Her is the highest-ranking official in St. Paul and oversees the entire police department creates an additional weight to the alleged behavior.

“When the supervisor is the one engaging in the conduct and there’s that power dynamic there, it’s much more likely they’re going to see it as offensive and unwanted and more severe,” Bolgert said. “It’s also important because when a supervisor engages in that conduct, it’s very likely their conduct is going to be attributable to the employer.”

In this case, that would be the city of St. Paul itself.

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(Liz Sawyer and Louis Krauss of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.)

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