"Central Park Karen" case is dismissed

In summer 2020, while walking her dog in Central Park, a white woman saw a black man who was bird-watching. The woman said the man aggressively confronted her and she feared for her safety and the safety of her dog. She told the man that she tell the police that there was an "African-American threatening her life." This became the Central Park Karen case, which has reached the Second Circuit.

The case is Cooper v. Franklin Templeton Investments, a summary order issued on June 8. The woman was Amy Cooper. The man was Christian Cooper. They are not related. After a video of this incident went viral, Amy was ostracized and her employer fired her and said "we do not condone racism of any kind." Claiming that her former employer did not interview the Mr. Cooper or obtain a recording of her 911 call to the police or engage in other investigative steps. Amy sues her former employer, Franklin Templeton, under the employment discrimination laws. She also charges her former employer with defamation because it implied she was a racist.

First, the employment discrimination claim. The Court of Appeals (Parker, Nathan and Pooler) says plaintiff has not plead any facts that would support an inference of discrimination. The court analyzes the case this way:

To the extent that Plaintiff contends that Defendants “implicated the race of their employee with each of [their] communications to the public, by repeatedly connecting [their] stated stance against racism with their termination of the Plaintiff,” that argument fails as a matter of law. Defendants’ statements made no mention of Plaintiff’s race, and even to the extent they could be read as accusing Plaintiff of being a racist, “a statement that someone is a ‘racist,’ while potentially indicating unfair dislike, does not indicate that the object of the statement is being rejected because of h[er] race.  ‘Racism’ is not a race, and discrimination on the basis of alleged racism is not the same as discrimination on the basis of race.”

We also have a defamation claim. Plaintiff says her former employer accused her of being a racist, which of course would damage her reputation in the community. But defamation law has a lot of exceptions. Statements of opinion are not defamatory. "To the extent that Defendants’ statements are read as accusing Plaintiff of being a racist, the reasonable reader would have understood this to be an expression of opinion based on the widely circulated video of Plaintiff’s encounter with Christian Cooper." The court then cites a series of cases from the Appellate Division and the Second Circuit, one dating to 1976, that stand for that proposition.