Courtney Williams never made her gripes with the military a secret. In the mid-2010s, she filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) about her time as a civilian staffer at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, settling the complaint in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money in 2018. She later spoke to the journalist Seth Harp for the book The Fort Bragg Cartel, which centered around the murder of two soldiers at the center of a massive corruption and drug-trafficking ring in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
"It was like they were trying to herd cattle, or take care of a bunch of children," Williams told Harp, recalling stories of JSOC operators showing up drunk to work and sexually harassing their colleagues, sometimes while throwing tomahawk axes into the walls or jokingly packing explosives into desks. Her testimony, which was also published as an excerpt in Politico, helped Harp paint a picture of the rampant substance abuse and fratricidal violence in JSOC.
