Woman Who Called Police on Black Bird-Watcher in Park Loses Bid to Get Job Back
Amy Cooper, AKA Central Park Karen, has no legal claim against her employer, the court says.
Labor laws in the United States were created to protect employees from being taken advantage of. They set a standard for fair wages and outline a number of other labor issues, such as workplace safety rules and regulations, workers' compensation, employee benefits, and so on. There are also guidelines surrounding the reasons you can and cannot fire someone. One of those is race. Amy Cooper, aka Central Park Karen, has been battling her former employee in hopes of getting her job back claiming that her company unlawfully fired her on the basis of race.
On May 25, 2020, Amy Cooper was caught on camera confronting a bird watcher, Christian Cooper, in Central Park. He asked her to put her dog back on its leash, which was the rule in the area where they were.
Instead of complying, she threatened to call the police and tell them "there's an African-American man threatening my life." After the video went viral, she was promptly fired from her job as an insurance portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton, a unit of San Mateo, California-based Franklin Resources.
The company said at the time that after conducting an internal review, they decided to let her go, saying "we do not tolerate racism of any kind." However, they never said anything about her race.
She sued the company in May 2021, claiming she was unlawfully fired. A federal district court in New York dismissed her complaint. At the appeal on Thursday, in a 3-0 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Cooper did not prove that Franklin Templeton illegally dismissed her, upholding the dismissal.
The court pointed out that Franklin Templeton's statements said nothing about Cooper's race, adding that the video had been circulated "in the midst of an ongoing national reckoning about systemic racism," pointing out that it had been taken the same day a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, who was Black.
Franklin Templeton is happy with the court's decision. "We continue to believe the company responded appropriately," it added.
