Trial for Anchor Fired for Epithet Nears
Thomas Burlington, the white news anchor who was fired after he used the word "n*****" in an editorial meeting, was largely successful in recent pretrial motions for his reverse discrimination suit against the Philadelphia Fox television station where he had worked.
June 02, 2015 at 08:00 PM
6 minute read
Thomas Burlington, the white news anchor who was fired after he used the word “n*****” in an editorial meeting, was largely successful in recent pretrial motions for his reverse discrimination suit against the Philadelphia Fox television station where he had worked.
A June trial is scheduled in federal court and, the judge has ruled, Burlington will be able to refer to the use of the word in various contexts without consequence by three black employees of the station, support his claim for damages, present his wife and two agents as witnesses, and use the cat's paw theory of liability, while Fox won't be able to mention that he was fired from his previous job as an anchor at a Harrisburg station, and the lawsuit he filed against the station, nor the outcome of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claim he filed after being fired from Fox 29.
Fox will, however, be able to use the state court suit that Burlington filed against the Philadelphia Daily News for an article that the newspaper ran on the incident at the editorial meeting in 2007.
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