A black journalist with awards Emmy accused Pix11 of treating her as a “slave” in a “plantation” before she was fired to talk about racial discrimination alleged in the news room, according to a bubble lawsuit against television channel of New York.
Ojinika Obieekwe, 46, a journalist originating from Nigeria working at Nexstar’s news station for more than 20 years, claimed she was given less help than white colleagues who forced her to do the job of two or three persons.
“All that is left to do at this point is the choice of cotton,” she would say at work, discussing her heavy load disproportionately, according to the lawsuit filed last month in the southern New York county.
“This can also be a plantation,” she said regularly, according to the lawsuit.
After a 2017 promotion, Obieekwe said she noticed two white men with the same role in the sister -owned Nexstar stations had less work to do and “were receiving more and better personnel support”, the complaint claimed.
The anchor and the entertainment reporter performs tasks that were usually given to a segment manufacturer or copies editor – even when the two white men won a higher salary, she claimed.
She began complaining openly about inequality in 2020.
The following year, she filed a complaint to the Nexstar Human Department of Human Resources and had a meeting with Nicole Tindiglia, who was recently employed as the director of channel news, according to court documents.
Tindiglia pledged to investigate Obiekwe’s claims and make changes to better support it – but “they were empty promises,” the lawsuit is claimed.
Obieekwe continued to complain aloud about her working conditions, the lawsuit said.
“Simply call me Django,” she would say, referring to the character of the title slave in Quentin Tarantino’s film in 2012, according to the lawsuit. “But even Django was uncontrolled.”
According to the lawsuit, she would point out: “I thought slavery was repealed.”
Around the fall 2022, Tindiglia called Obieekwe for a meeting and allegedly told her that inflammatory rhetoric was “making people uncomfortable,” the lawsuit said.
When people think about “slavery”, they think of “whipped and chains,” said the news director supposedly during the meeting.
Tindiglia fired Obieekwe in January 2023 for “not performing work tasks” and “disobedience”.
When Obiekwe’s SAG-AFTRA union lawyers pushed the network to provide evidence that the news anchor had failed to perform its duties, its former employees were suspected of being able to provide evidence.
Tindiglia later renounced those claims, according to the lawsuit.
The news anchor hired Andrew G. Celli, Jr. and Eric Abrams, lawyers at the New York Ecbawm -based legal firm to represent it.
It is seeking unspecified damage.
The post arrived at Pix11 for comment.
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Image Source : nypost.com