White Starbucks Manager Fired Amid Racism Wins $25 Million

The episode plunged one of America’s most ubiquitous brands into crisis.

In April 2018, two black men entered a Starbucks store in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia for a business meeting with a white man who had yet to arrive. While they were waiting, and before ordering, one of the two asked to use the bathroom. He was refused. Finally they were asked to leave. When they did not, an employee called the police.

The subsequent arrests, captured in videos viewed millions of times online, led to accusations of racism, protests and boycott threats. The company̵[ads1]7;s chief executive publicly apologized and described the way the men were treated as “reprehensible”. Starbucks took the extraordinary step of temporarily closing 8,000 stores to educate workers about racial bias.

On Monday, in a surprising twist, a federal jury in New Jersey ordered Starbucks to pay $25.6 million to a former regional manager after finding that the company had fired her amid the fallout from the Rittenhouse Square episode because she was white.

The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law prohibiting discrimination based on race, and awarded her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.

Laura Carlin Mattiacci, an attorney for Ms. Phillips, said she and her client were “very pleased” with the unanimous verdict, adding that “she proved by ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that punitive damages were warranted” under New Jersey law .

A spokeswoman for Starbucks declined to comment.

At the time of the episode, Phillips oversaw about 100 stores in Philadelphia, South Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland. She had been promoted to the job in 2011 after what she called her “exemplary performance” in six years as district manager in Ohio.

Phillips said in the lawsuit that Starbucks, as part of damage control efforts after the arrests, had tried to punish her and other white employees in and around Philadelphia even though they had not been involved in the incidents that led to the police being called.

Phillips said she had thrown herself into the company’s efforts to restore credibility and had tried to support hourly workers, organize managers to staff stores and cover employees who were afraid to run a group of protesters.

Amid the image-polishing campaign, Phillips said one of her supervisors, a black woman, asked her to suspend a white manager who oversaw stores in Philadelphia, but not the one in Rittenhouse Square, because of allegations that he had discrimination. conduct — allegations that Phillips said she knew to be untrue.

In contrast, Phillips said, no action was taken against the manager overseeing the Rittenhouse Square store, a black man who Phillips said had promoted the employee who called police.

Phillips said she was fired not long after she took the order to suspend the white manager. She said she had not previously been told she was doing a bad job, and that the only explanation she was given for the shooting was that “the situation cannot be restored.”

Starbucks denied in court documents that Phillips was fired because she was white and said she was let go because she performed poorly in response to the incident that led to the arrests.

“In this time of crisis,” a lawyer for Starbucks wrote in a lawsuit, the company’s “Philadelphia market needed a leader who could deliver,” adding that “Ms. Phillips failed in every aspect of that role.”

Starbucks ultimately chose not to charge the men at the center of the episode, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, both 23 at the time. Before suing over the ordeal, they reached a confidential financial settlement with the company and received a commitment from the City of Philadelphia to invest $200,000 to help young entrepreneurs.

“I want to make sure this situation doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Robinson said in an interview at the time. “What I want is for young men not to be traumatized by this, and instead be motivated, inspired.”

Attempts to reach Mr. Robinson and Mr. Nelson on Tuesday were unsuccessful.