Posted on 04/01/2014 4:00:01 PM PDT by nickcarraway
New York appeals court affirmed the 2012 ruling for Mirella Salemi.
A New York appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s 2012 ruling that a lesbian chef is owed $1.6 million for being forced to attend weekly prayer meetings where her boss would regularly warn that "gay people" were "going to go to hell."
Mirella Salemi sued Gloria's Tribeca Inc., Gloria's Tribecamex and principal owner Edward Globokar for violations of the New York City Human Rights Law after a string of incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2007. Gloria's Tribeca is a Mexican restaurant.
Salemi was awarded $400,000 in compensatory damages and $1.2 million in punitive damages in what her lawyer, Derek Smith, called "the largest employment verdict in 2012 in New York." A three-judge panel of the Appellate Division's Manhattan-based First Department affirmed the verdict for Salemi.
“He not only threatened her soul, but he also threatened her livelihood,” Smith told the New York Post in 2012. “He thought praying might cure her of her sexuality, but she is someone who didn’t need to be saved.”
Globokar had attempted to argue that he was simply exercising his right to free speech.
"The trial court properly protected Globokar's First Amendment rights by instructing the jury that he had 'a right to express his religious beliefs and practice religion, providing that he does not discriminate against his employees based on religion or sexual orientation,'" the judges wrote in their ruling.
[ If she didn’t like what he was doing, she could have sought employment elsewhere. Problem solved. He didn’t force her at the point of gun to attend his prayer sessions. ]
If he was meerely suggesting she pray there is no problem, but if he said theire woudl be consequences for NOT praying then thereis an issue.
Hostile workplace can extend to things like a poster on a wall (even of a personal workspace). Whether that is a biblical quote or a poster of a woman in a bikini.
The consequences would be termination. So be it. No one in a free nation should have a right to work at place where they aren't wanted.
If she doesn’t believe in God (or believes that there is nothing sinful about homosexuality) then his “threats” carry no weight (can a mortal condemn another person to eternal damnation?).
Oh, please. She is a trained chef and could easily have just quit and found another job someplace else. Working in NYC (as I did for almost 30 years) you run into all kinds of characters. Smart people move on from quirky bosses, losers go to court.
Stay away from them, don’t talk to them and don’t hire them.
What a crock.\
Not if you’re white, male, or Christian, or especially all of the above. Then you are expected to use your “privilege” (which to me is just another way of saying, “superiority”, if they but only reaslised it) and be able to just take it.
Rule 1: Never hire anybody that is gay.
Rule 2: Never hire a democrat.
They usually go hand in hand anyway.
A classical out-of-context quotation.
I’m surprised she did not raise a stink from the word go. She’s the valuable one in the picture. I wonder if she said she’d go along with it only intending to blindside this manager.
I have no doubt dollars signs popped up in her eyes the minute he began his prayer meetings. Well, she now has the start-up funds for a fabulous new restaurant and he’s going down the toilet.
And this will make an excellent sob-story for an episode of “Chopped.”
What a great country!
Homosexuality once an official mental illness. Now non acceptance of homosexuality as normal and healthy is the mental illness (homophobic)...what changed?..:/
Yeah, looks like a trap to me.
I cant believe there are people attempting to justify this. On legal grounds it is slam dunk. There is no reason one can give to say this was ok. Comments such as find a new job, or the “yabut” explanation is completely short cited. I dont agree with her life style but by no means does it justify what was done or a reason to can someone. She can either do the job or not...period, case closed.
Oooo, good point.
There used to be a legal line of reasoning about ACTUAL damages. I dont see any actual damages and certainly not 1.6 million in damages.
I agree that she shouldn’t have been compelled. I am disgusted at the double standard hypocrisy (usual MO of the left) that people can be compelled to go to diversity indoctrination, at the risk of losing their jobs, and the government totally supports this, even implements it at taxpayer expense.
According to the trial testimony, he would close the restaurant for two hours every afternoon and require the employees to attend a prayer session he would lead, at which he would preach that gays are going to hell.
$1.2 million of it doesn't even pretend to be "actual damages"; it's punitive damages. The amount sounds way high to me, but that's the problem with jury trials-- you always have more employees than employers, more tenants than landlords, more customers than business owners, more insureds than insurers, etc.
The "actual" damages are $400,000 for "emotional distress"-- again, way high in my book, but each side called a psychiatrist as a witness, and the jury was entitled to decide which expert it would believe; an appellate court can't second-guess the jury's verdict when there is evidence to support it, even if there's also evidence the other way.
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