is late to work 47 times , gets fired, jury awards her $11 million - Secure that bag queen!

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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, the girls’ school several blocks away... 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

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...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...The next day they awarded her $11.25 million in damages.

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, who had been an art student at Oberlin College, was an unlikely entry into the fitness world.

she took an office job at the David Barton Gym, where she worked to support herself through a tattooing apprenticeship

Racism and sexism — they are just pervasive in the fitness industry...In coastal cities, training is something you can do without a degree and you can make $75 an hour...But the management structure, she observed, is often white and male.

In response to the verdict, Equinox did not engage in the current fashion for self-reproach and vows to do better.

The case revolved in large part around allegations that a manager...repeatedly delivered his vulgar takes on Black female bodies, referred to nonwhite employees as “lazy” and expressed the hope that he could get them fired; he called one Black co-worker “neurodivergent.”

woman who was talking to a client who had specifically asked for a white trainer...

She recounted how upset she had been over her co-worker’s willingness to relay the “request as though it would just be good customer service to fulfill it.” When she told her boss, he went ahead and let the client have a white trainer anyway.