Black Woman Fired After Being Late to Work 47 Times in 10 Months Sues Employer For Discrimination, Wins $11.25 Million

Röbynn Europe, a former employee at the high-end gym franchise Equinox, was recently awarded $11.25 million in a discrimination lawsuit she filed against the company. https://t.co/lu5u793ayt pic.twitter.com/wBlgRhSfqT

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 26, 2023

Between 2018 and 2019, Röbynn Europe (pictured above at the center), 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 J. 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 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 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.