Who Leaves Women Behind?
A Call to Fire Dorothy J. Lennig and Rescue HER Resiliency Center from State Sabotage
By Barry O’Connell
As the leaves begin to turn and the nights grow colder, Maryland faces a moral reckoning. The state’s own agency—tasked with protecting women in crisis—is now the architect of their abandonment. At the center of this betrayal stands Dorothy J. Lennig, Esq., director of a state-funded estate agency locked in a protracted and punitive battle with HER Resiliency Center and its executive director, Natasha Guynes.
The facts are chilling. The state is in arrears to HER Resiliency Center by $218,000—a staggering sum for a small nonprofit whose mission is to pull women off the street and into safety, dignity, and economic independence. These are not abstract figures. This is rent unpaid, staff unfunded, beds unmade. This is winter coming for women who will sleep on concrete, barter their bodies for survival, and disappear into the margins if we do nothing.
And the cruelty doesn’t stop at fiscal neglect. The state is demanding a 55% matching requirement for HER Resiliency Center—an arbitrary and discriminatory burden not imposed on similar agencies. This is not just bureaucratic overreach. It’s targeted sabotage. It’s reputational strangulation. It’s a slow-motion defunding of the very lifeline that has helped hundreds of women reclaim their lives.
One woman, rescued in 2021, now earns $80,000 a year and pays taxes on it. She was once “those people.” Now she’s a taxpayer. That’s the transformation HER Resiliency Center delivers. That’s the ROI on compassion. And that’s what Dorothy Lennig is trying to destroy.
Let’s be clear: no little girl dreams of surviving by selling herself on street corners. These women are not garbage. They are not disposable. They are not beneath the dignity of the state. And yet Dorothy Lennig’s actions—whether driven by malice, incompetence, or institutional bias—have left them behind.
Governor Wes Moore has said he doesn’t leave anyone behind. Now is the time to prove it. Fire Dorothy J. Lennig. Pay HER Resiliency Center what it is owed. End the discriminatory matching requirement. And restore the moral compass of Maryland’s public institutions.
Because winter is coming. And if we fail these women now, we are complicit in their suffering.