From the New York Times news section:

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.

By Ginia Bellafante
May 26, 2023

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 [tuition $58,700, then Oberlin college], 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.

It would be interesting to see a study following up blacks who win these kind of absurdly large payouts from dimwitted juries in discrimination lawsuits. Are they as likely to be broke ten years later as lottery winners?

And what can we learn about reparations from this?