A judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed on Thursday a discrimination lawsuit against The Washington Post filed by a reporter at the paper.
The reporter, Felicia Sonmez, accused the paper in July 2021 of discriminating against her by barring her from reporting on stories related to sexual assault after she had publicly identified herself as a victim of assault.
The lawsuit named The Post as a defendant, as well as its former executive editor, Martin Baron, and five other top editors.
Judge Anthony C. Epstein of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, in dismissing the case, said that Ms. Sonmez had not made “a plausible claim that The Post took adverse employment actions, or created a hostile work environment, because of her sex or status as a victim of sexual assault.”
Judge Epstein wrote that “a news publication has a constitutionally protected right to adopt and enforce policies intended to protect public trust in its impartiality and objectivity.”
Ms. Sonmez’s lawyer, Sundeep Hora, said that they planned to appeal the decision.
“We’re disappointed in the ruling and we strongly disagree with the ruling,” he said.
A spokeswoman for The Post declined to comment.
Ms. Sonmez joined The Post in 2018 as a national political reporter. She said that within a few months of starting at The Post, her editors forbade her from covering the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, a Supreme Court nominee at the time, after Ms. Sonmez issued a statement about being sexually assaulted by another journalist. (The journalist has denied the allegations.)
About a year later, Ms. Sonmez said she was barred for a second time from covering stories relating to sexual assault after she again spoke publicly about her assault, this time to request a correction to an article in Reason magazine dealing with the allegations against the man she accused.
That coverage ban on Ms. Sonmez was lifted only after she publicly pleaded with her editors to do so, she said in her lawsuit. Being denied the ability to cover newsworthy stories and having to explain the ban to her editors had harmed her career, she said, and caused her economic loss and mental and emotional distress.
Judge Epstein noted in his ruling that Ms. Sonmez had kept her job after her public statements and had not stated that she had been given “second-rate stories” during the two coverage bans.
“Her only complaint about her assignments during the bans is that they did not include stories with #MeToo-related ramifications,” he continued.
The Post, as part of its argument that it had not broken the law, requested that the case be dismissed under legislation known as Anti-SLAPP, which is intended to protect speech. The Post had argued that its decisions on which stories Ms. Sonmez was banned from covering was part of its editorial judgment protected by the First Amendment.
Judge Epstein rejected that argument, saying the ban was “not speech” and therefore the legislation didn’t apply to the case.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
