What are the best ways to find a job with a social entrepreneurial company?

I am trying to find a job though a recruiting company, and they told me they would need to contact my ex-employers to check my references.

• I have good references for all my previous jobs except the last one that I quit recently. Before I quit (which was 7 month ago), I had to go though some legal fight against my ex-supervisor for his inappropriate and violent behavior, so if they contact him, then for sure he would not say anything good about me at all. As they said they would have to talk to him directly as he was my direct supervisor, I had no choice but to give them his number. They contacted him and faxed him an blank evaluation form for him to fill out. However, few days later my ex-employer contacted the recruiting company and told them that the company would not fill out the evaluation form given and told them instead to contact me to get a copy of the performance evaluation which my ex-supervisor gave me while I was still working at the company. The company then gave them only three pieces of information such as job title, job description and employment period, but didn't tell them anything about the content of the performance evaluation. I do remember that I received the performance evaluation and it was done very unfairly due to my ex-supervisor's hatred and grudge against me. My question is, Why would any company tell a potential employer to contact the job applicant instead to get an evaluation when they are supposed to provide it by themselves? Is it a common HR practice? Or is it some SLY TRICK that they use because they want to prevent me from getting a job but they do not want to get into any legal trouble, and that's why they mentioned of the performance evaluation which was a very bad evaluation, but they did not want to disclose it by themselves and told the recruiting company to contact me to get it. If their intention had been purely to cover their butts, then should not they just have given those three piece of information only and they would not have needed to tell the recruiting company to contact me to get the performance evaluation?

• Answer:

  Because they can't really give out any negative information due to a legal issue back in the 60s where a secretary was fired and couldn't get hired because of what her previous employer said about her to potential new employers. No one wants to be sued. If your previous evaluations from other companies/supervisors are good and only that of your last supervisor was negative, any HR reviewer should be able to read between the lines. If asked to explain just don't sound like a whiny teenager. Describe what happened as brief, concisely and professionally as possible.