WARREN — Trumbull County Commissioner Niki Frenchko responded Tuesday to allegations in a federal lawsuit filed by the receptionist at the commissioner’s office that Frenchko has made bigoted statements about Italians.

Frenchko said she’s never made comments to staff about their ethnic heritage.

The lawsuit, filed Monday by receptionist Dawn Guarino Gedeon, seeks $1 million from Frenchko and the commissioners office because of what Guarino Gedeon calls Frenchko’s “campaign of harassment and retaliation against (Guarino Gedeon) and others.”

The suit alleges Frenchko has made remarks “in order to make the work environment intolerable in an obvious effort to force (Guarino Gedeon) and others to resign from county employment.”

Guarino Gedeon stated that she is Italian American and that part of Frenchko’s harassment has been to make “derisive statements regarding Italian Americans,” with the statements “repeatedly likening Italians to mafia types and organized crime members.”

Frenchko responded by saying said she has an extremely diverse ethnic background and that her late sister was Italian, as well as her stepfather and significant other.

“I am very sensitive to language. I’ve had to cut off dealing with certain people because they’ve made comments” that stereotype people, she said. “My uncle is Honduran and Puerto Rican,” and he is married to a Chinese woman, she said.

“I have never made any comments to staff about their ethnic heritage or about anyone’s heritage,” Frenchko said.

“That so bothers me that anyone would say anything. My family is immigrants ourselves, even the Eastern European half. We came over, and they worked in the coal mines and the steel mills.

“And my family from Puerto Rico came to work in the steel mills. I just don’t understand. It’s so far from the truth. It makes me sad that anyone would even think it,” she said.

She called the lawsuit “frivolous” and the remarks in it “ludicrous.”

She added, “I don’t make ethnic slurs. It’s disgusting and not who I am, not who I’ve been raised to be.”

She said lawsuits filed against her by county employees are an “effort to inhibit me from holding them accountable to the taxpayers. This lawsuit, like the others, will fail because I’m simply making people work for the taxpayers again. I will not be deterred by their outlandish claims nor their political stunts.”