Jury Awards $6 Million for Reverse Religious Bias

In a rare case of “reverse” religious discrimination, a California jury has awarded $6.5 million to a former employee of a temporary agency who claimed the company failed to promote her because she did not belong to the same religious group as many of her co-workers.

Lynn Noyes's “lack of certain religious beliefs was a motivating factor” for why she was not selected for the job of software development manager for Kelly Services, the jury's verdict form said. The award includes $5.9 million in punitive damages.

The job went to an employee who, like many others who worked at Kelly's Nevada City, Calif., branch, belonged to the Fellowship of Friends, a “Fourth Way” -- or “esoteric Christianity” -- sect influenced by the mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. The supervisor responsible for filling the position, William Heinz, was also a member.

“The Fellowship had essentially taken over the Nevada City office,” Noyes's attorney, M. Catherine Jones, said.

Kelly Services insisted there was no intentional discrimination, pointing out that Heinz originally offered the position to a non-Fellowship member, who declined. It also claimed the decision to give Fellowship member Joep Jilesen the job was made through a “consensus” of Heinz and three other managers.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted in a May 2007 decision that two of those managers did not recall reaching a “consensus” and one of them testified that Heinz made the ultimate decision.

The evidence “supports a finding that Heinz had an unspoken motive for promoting Jilesen over Noyes -- favoritism toward members of the Fellowship,” the court said in reversing a trial judge who summarily dismissed the case.

Reverse religious discrimination has cropped up in employment law cases alleging a Mormon supervisor was biased against non-Mormons and a born-again Christian police chief created a hostile work environment with his “relentless proselytizing.” Shapolia v. Los Alamos National Laboratory, 992 F.2d 1033 (1993); Venters v. City of Delphi, 123 F.3d 956 (1997).

Noyes's case focused on the relatively obscure Fellowship, which has about 2,000 members and says on its website that it practices “the art and science of awakening.” According to Noyes, 13 of the 35 full-time Kelly employees in Nevada City were members and, on the floor where she worked, nine of 13 employees belonged to the Fellowship.

"No matter how good you were at your job, it didn't matter," she testified. "The jobs were going to go to Fellowship members." Noyes sued Kelly in December 2002 and was laid off in May 2004.

In his closing argument, Kelly attorney E. Joseph Connaughton made a clumsy attempt to compare Noyes to some of the more notorious plaintiffs in personal injury and discrimination cases. “We live in a culture of blame, don't we?” he said. “The coffee's too hot, there's a lawsuit. Our kid doesn't make the sports team, there's a lawsuit.”

The jury awarded Noyes $147,174 for past and future economic damages and $500,000 for emotional distress. Kelly, which turned down Noyes's pretrial offer to settle the case for $1.2 million, plans to appeal –- and it may, at least, win a reduction in the judgment because of the nearly 10:1 ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.

“We believe [the] decision was made in error with respect to both the law and the facts in this case,” the company's general counsel, Daniel T. Lis, said.

For Marysville, Calif., Appeal-Democrat coverage of the trial, click here.

By Matthew Heller
4/11/08