Zone1 Black woman awarded $11.25 million discrimination lawsuit.

[BlueGin]

Juries consist of many stupid people.

Lots of bleeding heart lefties.

 

[Muhammed]

Why do so many have this compulsion for calling others names simply because they perceive some difference in them than oneself?

They don't. You're just playing victim because you're an LWNJ pathetic loser.

 

[Mac-7]

Read the story before jumping to conclusions. She deserved something, but likely won't see anything close to this. I can totally see a wealthy NYC health club being full of toxic douchebags. I've seen countless supervisors fired over my 28 year career for some incredibly stupid behavior.


Between 2018 and 2019, Röbynn Europe, a former professional body builder, worked at an Equinox on the Upper East Side, where she managed personal trainers. Years earlier, as a scholarship student at Brearley, the girls’ school several blocks away, where she began in seventh grade, commuting first from Canarsie and then Coney Island, she had experienced the coded bias of privileged teenagers. There was only one other Black student in her class. But still that had not prepared her for what she described as crass, unfiltered expressions of prejudice from male colleagues in an expensive gym, awash with the scent of eucalyptus oil if not the base notes of enlightenment.

Ms. Europe’s tenure at the club was short-lived; Equinox terminated her employment in less than a year because, the company said, she was late 47 times in the course of 10 months. Ms. Europe held a different view of her firing, believing that her lateness was merely a pretext for discrimination, and soon after she filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, arguing that she had been subjected to a hostile work environment and eventually let go because of her race and gender. Last week, a predominantly white jury of five women and three men agreed, delivering a verdict in little over an hour. The next day they awarded her $11.25 million in damages.

The swiftness of the jury’s decision and the size of the payout — $10 million in punitive damages and $1.25 million for the distress she suffered — follow a pattern similar to the verdict reached in the same courthouse just a few weeks before, in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Donald Trump. In both instances, the process and outcome suggest the ways in which recent transformative social movements around race and gender might reframe the way that juries think about the long shadow of emotional disruption that bigotry or sexual violence can produce.

Ms. Europe, who had been at art student at Oberlin College, was an unlikely entry into the fitness world. Returning to New York after graduation, she took an office job at the David Barton Gym, where she worked to support herself through a tattooing apprenticeship. In 2006, she received her certification as a personal trainer. “Racism and sexism — they are just pervasive in the fitness industry,” she said when I met her at her lawyer’s office in Brooklyn recently.

“In coastal cities, training is something you can do without a degree and you can make $75 an hour — there are not a lot of opportunities to do that, so it’s a big draw for people of color.” But the management structure, she observed, is often white and male.

In response to the verdict, Equinox did not engage in the current fashion for self-reproach and vows to do better. Instead, it issued a statement saying that it “vehemently disagreed” with the finding and did not “tolerate discrimination in any form.” In the motion it filed asking the court to reconsider the case, either by way of a new trial or a reduction in the award, lawyers maintained that the jurors, “guided by sympathy and emotion,” had “erroneously” bought into the plaintiff’s claim that she had been the victim of racial animus and “issued extreme, unconscionable damages” as a result.

The case revolved in large part around allegations that a manager who reported to Ms. Europe, a middle-aged white man whom she described as insulated by his relationships with people above her, refused to accept her as his supervisor. She claimed that he repeatedly delivered his vulgar takes on Black female bodies, referred to nonwhite employees as “lazy” and expressed the hope that he could get them fired; he called one Black co-worker “autistic.”

In the early spring of 2019, the suit claimed, he “demanded” that his boss wait outside the gym with him for a young Black woman to leave a cafe where she worked so he could make a pass at her, on the theory that he would be better positioned with a Black person standing next to him. Ms. Europe refused.

The accumulation of these incidents, she testified, made her time at Equinox so stressful that the bulimia she struggled with for much of her life worsened. While working there, Ms. Europe told me, her condition was bad enough that she began vomiting several times a day and started to throw up blood; she eventually had to enter an inpatient treatment program for eating disorders. Her lawyers, all of them women at Crumiller, which describes itself as “a feminist litigation firm,” argued that their client’s complaints to male bosses went unheard.

On the witness stand, Ms. Europe talked about an incident that had left her feeling especially defeated. One evening in June 2019, she was in her office when she got a call from someone who dealt directly with members, a woman who was talking to a client who had specifically asked for a white trainer. Ms. Europe explained that a request like that exposed the company to liability and would need to be handled by a supervisor, whom she assumed would tell the client that what he was asking for was inappropriate.

She recounted how upset she had been over her co-worker’s willingness to relay the “request as though it would just be good customer service to fulfill it.” When she told her boss, he went ahead and let the client have a white trainer anyway.

Although he was reprimanded by a superior, in writing a week later, and according to a spokesman at Equinox, fired one year after that, Ms. Europe happened to receive a second disciplinary warning for lateness on the same day that she had written an email bringing the issue to the attention of managers and people in human resources. Three months later, she was fired.

Ms. Europe never denied that she was often late for work, but her lawyers had presented jurors with a chart indicating how many other people also failed to show up on time, though, with relatively few consequences.

In their motion to have the case re-evaluated, lawyers for Equinox did not dispute that the racially and sexually charged comments made by her subordinate occurred but argued that they were too few to support claims of a hostile workplace. Beyond that, they maintained that the emotional distress Ms. Europe suffered as a function of her time at the gym was not “egregious” enough — a legal term — to warrant the amount of money the jury recommended.

The matter of what pain is worth, in monetary terms, remains an endlessly fraught and divisive question. Judges can — and often do — overrule decisions juries make in these types of civil cases. Some legislators in New York State, for example, believe that the privilege ought to be curbed, arguing that these reversals can seem arbitrary. But the conclusions of jurors can also seem inscrutable.

And yet sometimes a remarkable harmony emerges. In November, a federal jury in Texas awarded $366 million to a Black saleswoman who had sued FedEx over discrimination in a case that was thought to deliver the largest ever verdict in litigation involving employment and racial bias. Three months later, a federal judge rejected the company’s bid to throw out the award or reduce it.

She Said Equinox Fired Her for Being a Black Woman. A Jury Agreed.

The high-end gym franchise was ordered to pay Röbynn Europe, a former employee, damages of $11.25 million.

www.nytimes.com

What can we conclude from this story?

Dont hire black people because they are impossible to let go later if they are lazy

 

[Blaster]

True. I get called all sort of bad things right here on these forums.

Did you ever sue someone for calling you a bad name?

 

[Blaster]

Arrange an OJ 65IQ Black racist jury unhappy bout white business forcing them to work to survive and presto! Anything goes If it goes to any black.

OJ Simpson would agree.

 

[Polishprince]

If you are late for work 47 times in less than a year, you are giving them a pretty good excuse for termination

More people get fired for being late than anything else, at least officially. Its the easiest thing for an employer to actually document and prevent this kind of stupid litigation.

BTW, no wonder why businesses and other rich people are leaving NYC with all of these crazy juries up there.

 

[pknopp]

They don't. You're just playing victim because you're an LWNJ pathetic loser.

There you go. Feel better? I don't understand it but if it somehow makes you feel better.

 

[Muhammed]

Read the story before jumping to conclusions. She deserved something, but likely won't see anything close to this. I can totally see a wealthy NYC health club being full of toxic douchebags. I've seen countless supervisors fired over my 28 year career for some incredibly stupid behavior.


Between 2018 and 2019, Röbynn Europe, a former professional body builder, worked at an Equinox on the Upper East Side, where she managed personal trainers. Years earlier, as a scholarship student at Brearley, the girls’ school several blocks away, where she began in seventh grade, commuting first from Canarsie and then Coney Island, she had experienced the coded bias of privileged teenagers. There was only one other Black student in her class. But still that had not prepared her for what she described as crass, unfiltered expressions of prejudice from male colleagues in an expensive gym, awash with the scent of eucalyptus oil if not the base notes of enlightenment.

Ms. Europe’s tenure at the club was short-lived; Equinox terminated her employment in less than a year because, the company said, she was late 47 times in the course of 10 months. Ms. Europe held a different view of her firing, believing that her lateness was merely a pretext for discrimination, and soon after she filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, arguing that she had been subjected to a hostile work environment and eventually let go because of her race and gender. Last week, a predominantly white jury of five women and three men agreed, delivering a verdict in little over an hour. The next day they awarded her $11.25 million in damages.

The swiftness of the jury’s decision and the size of the payout — $10 million in punitive damages and $1.25 million for the distress she suffered — follow a pattern similar to the verdict reached in the same courthouse just a few weeks before, in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Donald Trump. In both instances, the process and outcome suggest the ways in which recent transformative social movements around race and gender might reframe the way that juries think about the long shadow of emotional disruption that bigotry or sexual violence can produce.

Ms. Europe, who had been at art student at Oberlin College, was an unlikely entry into the fitness world. Returning to New York after graduation, she took an office job at the David Barton Gym, where she worked to support herself through a tattooing apprenticeship. In 2006, she received her certification as a personal trainer. “Racism and sexism — they are just pervasive in the fitness industry,” she said when I met her at her lawyer’s office in Brooklyn recently.

“In coastal cities, training is something you can do without a degree and you can make $75 an hour — there are not a lot of opportunities to do that, so it’s a big draw for people of color.” But the management structure, she observed, is often white and male.

In response to the verdict, Equinox did not engage in the current fashion for self-reproach and vows to do better. Instead, it issued a statement saying that it “vehemently disagreed” with the finding and did not “tolerate discrimination in any form.” In the motion it filed asking the court to reconsider the case, either by way of a new trial or a reduction in the award, lawyers maintained that the jurors, “guided by sympathy and emotion,” had “erroneously” bought into the plaintiff’s claim that she had been the victim of racial animus and “issued extreme, unconscionable damages” as a result.

The case revolved in large part around allegations that a manager who reported to Ms. Europe, a middle-aged white man whom she described as insulated by his relationships with people above her, refused to accept her as his supervisor. She claimed that he repeatedly delivered his vulgar takes on Black female bodies, referred to nonwhite employees as “lazy” and expressed the hope that he could get them fired; he called one Black co-worker “autistic.”

In the early spring of 2019, the suit claimed, he “demanded” that his boss wait outside the gym with him for a young Black woman to leave a cafe where she worked so he could make a pass at her, on the theory that he would be better positioned with a Black person standing next to him. Ms. Europe refused.

The accumulation of these incidents, she testified, made her time at Equinox so stressful that the bulimia she struggled with for much of her life worsened. While working there, Ms. Europe told me, her condition was bad enough that she began vomiting several times a day and started to throw up blood; she eventually had to enter an inpatient treatment program for eating disorders. Her lawyers, all of them women at Crumiller, which describes itself as “a feminist litigation firm,” argued that their client’s complaints to male bosses went unheard.

On the witness stand, Ms. Europe talked about an incident that had left her feeling especially defeated. One evening in June 2019, she was in her office when she got a call from someone who dealt directly with members, a woman who was talking to a client who had specifically asked for a white trainer. Ms. Europe explained that a request like that exposed the company to liability and would need to be handled by a supervisor, whom she assumed would tell the client that what he was asking for was inappropriate.

She recounted how upset she had been over her co-worker’s willingness to relay the “request as though it would just be good customer service to fulfill it.” When she told her boss, he went ahead and let the client have a white trainer anyway.

Although he was reprimanded by a superior, in writing a week later, and according to a spokesman at Equinox, fired one year after that, Ms. Europe happened to receive a second disciplinary warning for lateness on the same day that she had written an email bringing the issue to the attention of managers and people in human resources. Three months later, she was fired.

Ms. Europe never denied that she was often late for work, but her lawyers had presented jurors with a chart indicating how many other people also failed to show up on time, though, with relatively few consequences.

In their motion to have the case re-evaluated, lawyers for Equinox did not dispute that the racially and sexually charged comments made by her subordinate occurred but argued that they were too few to support claims of a hostile workplace. Beyond that, they maintained that the emotional distress Ms. Europe suffered as a function of her time at the gym was not “egregious” enough — a legal term — to warrant the amount of money the jury recommended.

The matter of what pain is worth, in monetary terms, remains an endlessly fraught and divisive question. Judges can — and often do — overrule decisions juries make in these types of civil cases. Some legislators in New York State, for example, believe that the privilege ought to be curbed, arguing that these reversals can seem arbitrary. But the conclusions of jurors can also seem inscrutable.

And yet sometimes a remarkable harmony emerges. In November, a federal jury in Texas awarded $366 million to a Black saleswoman who had sued FedEx over discrimination in a case that was thought to deliver the largest ever verdict in litigation involving employment and racial bias. Three months later, a federal judge rejected the company’s bid to throw out the award or reduce it.

She Said Equinox Fired Her for Being a Black Woman. A Jury Agreed.

The high-end gym franchise was ordered to pay Röbynn Europe, a former employee, damages of $11.25 million.

www.nytimes.com

There's obvious corruption going on in these Democrat run courthouses. The Democratic party needs to be dissolved and prosecuted under RICO statutes. The swamp needs draining.

 

[odanny]

They don't. You're just playing victim because you're an LWNJ pathetic loser.

You really are industrial grade stupid.

 

[Muhammed]

There you go. Feel better? I don't understand it but if it somehow makes you feel better.

No it doesn't you pathetic loser. You only think that does because you are a moron.

You have repeatedly and regularly proven yourself to be an extremely dishonest lying piece of shit with a very low IQ in this forum. I point it out as a public service, not because it makes me feel good.

Why don't you just stop being a lying piece of shit?

 

[TNHarley]

People are so fuckin whiny and entitled its nauseating

 

[Hang on Sloopy]

.

Somebody got rich because they got called bad names.

Another take on the George Floyd Lottery.


Does this mean I can go back and sue the schools I went to that allowed other students to verbally bully me?




Time is coming.




.

gunna say that ghetto lotto has huge payouts. wish i was a young black punk getting my rear capped and getting my family a cool 20 mil

 

[Blaster]

I lost all faith in our jury system when OJ was found not guilty.

 

[DGS49]

There is something here that just doesn't compute. The woman is either seriously neurotic or was gaming the system in the hope of just such a lawsuit in the future. These jobs are a dime a dozen. She could have left any time and found a position that was more in keeping with her preferences; it's not like she was building up her retirement fund.

American tort law is one of the worst manifestations of our fucked up society. Her case was worth less than the attorney's fees.

 

[Woodznutz]

Did you ever sue someone for calling you a bad name?

I just consider the source, with pity.

 

[odanny]

I would have no problem with culpability, but the amount of the award is ridiculous, and if saner heads prevail, will likely be overturned.

 

[AZrailwhale]

If you are late for work 47 times in less than a year, you are giving them a pretty good excuse for termination

That's nearly once a week. In the phone company I worked for, a union shop by the way, If I remember correctly five tardies in a year was grounds for a suspension and a recurring pattern was justification for termination.

 

[odanny]

That's nearly once a week. In the phone company I worked for, a union shop by the way, If I remember correctly five tardies in a year was grounds for a suspension and a recurring pattern was justification for termination.

Same here, I was always a 1/2 hour every day, and if I wasnt, then it felt like I was late, and I rarely felt that way. Our union shops were not some high priced health club catering to a to a hoity toity bunch of wealthy elitists, and it seems that her fellow employees were not reprimanded for the same behavior. That likely won her case.

 

[Orangecat]

Read the story before jumping to conclusions. She deserved something, but likely won't see anything close to this. I can totally see a wealthy NYC health club being full of toxic douchebags. I've seen countless supervisors fired over my 28 year career for some incredibly stupid behavior.


Between 2018 and 2019, Röbynn Europe, a former professional body builder, worked at an Equinox on the Upper East Side, where she managed personal trainers. Years earlier, as a scholarship student at Brearley, the girls’ school several blocks away, where she began in seventh grade, commuting first from Canarsie and then Coney Island, she had experienced the coded bias of privileged teenagers. There was only one other Black student in her class. But still that had not prepared her for what she described as crass, unfiltered expressions of prejudice from male colleagues in an expensive gym, awash with the scent of eucalyptus oil if not the base notes of enlightenment.

Ms. Europe’s tenure at the club was short-lived; Equinox terminated her employment in less than a year because, the company said, she was late 47 times in the course of 10 months. Ms. Europe held a different view of her firing, believing that her lateness was merely a pretext for discrimination, and soon after she filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, arguing that she had been subjected to a hostile work environment and eventually let go because of her race and gender. Last week, a predominantly white jury of five women and three men agreed, delivering a verdict in little over an hour. The next day they awarded her $11.25 million in damages.

The swiftness of the jury’s decision and the size of the payout — $10 million in punitive damages and $1.25 million for the distress she suffered — follow a pattern similar to the verdict reached in the same courthouse just a few weeks before, in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Donald Trump. In both instances, the process and outcome suggest the ways in which recent transformative social movements around race and gender might reframe the way that juries think about the long shadow of emotional disruption that bigotry or sexual violence can produce.

Ms. Europe, who had been at art student at Oberlin College, was an unlikely entry into the fitness world. Returning to New York after graduation, she took an office job at the David Barton Gym, where she worked to support herself through a tattooing apprenticeship. In 2006, she received her certification as a personal trainer. “Racism and sexism — they are just pervasive in the fitness industry,” she said when I met her at her lawyer’s office in Brooklyn recently.

“In coastal cities, training is something you can do without a degree and you can make $75 an hour — there are not a lot of opportunities to do that, so it’s a big draw for people of color.” But the management structure, she observed, is often white and male.

In response to the verdict, Equinox did not engage in the current fashion for self-reproach and vows to do better. Instead, it issued a statement saying that it “vehemently disagreed” with the finding and did not “tolerate discrimination in any form.” In the motion it filed asking the court to reconsider the case, either by way of a new trial or a reduction in the award, lawyers maintained that the jurors, “guided by sympathy and emotion,” had “erroneously” bought into the plaintiff’s claim that she had been the victim of racial animus and “issued extreme, unconscionable damages” as a result.

The case revolved in large part around allegations that a manager who reported to Ms. Europe, a middle-aged white man whom she described as insulated by his relationships with people above her, refused to accept her as his supervisor. She claimed that he repeatedly delivered his vulgar takes on Black female bodies, referred to nonwhite employees as “lazy” and expressed the hope that he could get them fired; he called one Black co-worker “autistic.”

In the early spring of 2019, the suit claimed, he “demanded” that his boss wait outside the gym with him for a young Black woman to leave a cafe where she worked so he could make a pass at her, on the theory that he would be better positioned with a Black person standing next to him. Ms. Europe refused.

The accumulation of these incidents, she testified, made her time at Equinox so stressful that the bulimia she struggled with for much of her life worsened. While working there, Ms. Europe told me, her condition was bad enough that she began vomiting several times a day and started to throw up blood; she eventually had to enter an inpatient treatment program for eating disorders. Her lawyers, all of them women at Crumiller, which describes itself as “a feminist litigation firm,” argued that their client’s complaints to male bosses went unheard.

On the witness stand, Ms. Europe talked about an incident that had left her feeling especially defeated. One evening in June 2019, she was in her office when she got a call from someone who dealt directly with members, a woman who was talking to a client who had specifically asked for a white trainer. Ms. Europe explained that a request like that exposed the company to liability and would need to be handled by a supervisor, whom she assumed would tell the client that what he was asking for was inappropriate.

She recounted how upset she had been over her co-worker’s willingness to relay the “request as though it would just be good customer service to fulfill it.” When she told her boss, he went ahead and let the client have a white trainer anyway.

Although he was reprimanded by a superior, in writing a week later, and according to a spokesman at Equinox, fired one year after that, Ms. Europe happened to receive a second disciplinary warning for lateness on the same day that she had written an email bringing the issue to the attention of managers and people in human resources. Three months later, she was fired.

Ms. Europe never denied that she was often late for work, but her lawyers had presented jurors with a chart indicating how many other people also failed to show up on time, though, with relatively few consequences.

In their motion to have the case re-evaluated, lawyers for Equinox did not dispute that the racially and sexually charged comments made by her subordinate occurred but argued that they were too few to support claims of a hostile workplace. Beyond that, they maintained that the emotional distress Ms. Europe suffered as a function of her time at the gym was not “egregious” enough — a legal term — to warrant the amount of money the jury recommended.

The matter of what pain is worth, in monetary terms, remains an endlessly fraught and divisive question. Judges can — and often do — overrule decisions juries make in these types of civil cases. Some legislators in New York State, for example, believe that the privilege ought to be curbed, arguing that these reversals can seem arbitrary. But the conclusions of jurors can also seem inscrutable.

And yet sometimes a remarkable harmony emerges. In November, a federal jury in Texas awarded $366 million to a Black saleswoman who had sued FedEx over discrimination in a case that was thought to deliver the largest ever verdict in litigation involving employment and racial bias. Three months later, a federal judge rejected the company’s bid to throw out the award or reduce it.

She Said Equinox Fired Her for Being a Black Woman. A Jury Agreed.

The high-end gym franchise was ordered to pay Röbynn Europe, a former employee, damages of $11.25 million.

www.nytimes.com

Get used to this phrase: Overturned upon appeal.

 

[Lisa558]

What can we conclude from this story?

Dont hire black people because they are impossible to let go later if they are lazy

Beat me to the punch. This type of miscarriage of justice will just make it harder for qualified blacks to get a job.

As a former business owner, I hired regardless of color. But in this climate, I’d be very reluctant to hire a black person knowing that if they were tardy, insubordinate, just did crappy work, etc., my hands would be tied in getting rid of him.