A Catholic marketing executive at jeweler Tiffany & Co. in New York has filed a lawsuit against the company, saying it discriminated against her for saying that Jews killed Jesus.
Kristin Rightnour is seeking unspecified damages against the jeweler where she worked as a marketing director from October 2013.
According to the lawsuit, in April 2014, she had a conversation with a Jewish colleague. She was talking to one Catholic and one Jewish co-worker in the office when they started chatting about Easter plans.
When her Jewish colleague asked them about Easter mass, she explained the crucifixion story.
"Rather, the Jewish colleague laughed at the story and replied, 'They didn't teach us any of this in Hebrew school!'" according to the lawsuit.
But in August 2014, a human resources managed told Rightnour that a co-worker had complained, saying that she said that "the Jewish people killed Jesus".
Rightnour "vigorously denied ... having ever said anything of the sort while simultaneously maintaining, when asked, that she is in fact a devout Catholic, that her religion was known to her colleagues, and that what Ms. Rightnour had explained is indeed a standard Catholic belief," according to New York Daily News.
She was reprimanded and put on a one-year probation. In December of that year, Rightnour complained about her punishment and she alleged that Tiffany retaliated by giving her a mediocre performance review.
After she filed a complaint with the United States Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the jeweler is alleged to have bypassed her promotion before firing her in August 2015.
"What you have here is an employer engaging in a systematic, yet brutally transparent, scheme to punish an accomplished management-level employee for raising a good faith complaint — that she was treated disparately because of her religion," said Rightnour's lawyer, Alexander Coleman.
