BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — An Alabama university was ordered to pay millions to an Iranian-born cancer researcher in a discrimination lawsuit that said she was was repeatedly called a racial epithet by a colleague, who at one point brandished a gun at her.
A federal jury on Monday decided the University of Alabama at Birmingham should pay Fariba Moeinpour, a naturalized citizen from Iran, $3 million and ordered the colleague to pay her nearly $1 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Moeinpour said that the harassment began almost immediately after she started working in a cancer research lab at the university in 2011.
The lawsuit said employee Mary Jo Cagle was the primary perpetrator of the harassment. The lawsuit also named the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the director of employee relations in the human resources department as defendants, alleging that the school ignored repeated reports of harassment.
“I believe that a person cannot be American if they don’t value human being regardless of race and nationality,” Moeinpour told The Associated Press. But she said that she felt the university and Mary Jo Cagle “did not value that” throughout her employment.
The lawsuit depicted consistent harassment for the nine years that Moeinpour was employed with the university before she was terminated in 2020. Witness accounts and audio recordings that corroborated Moeinpour’s account were presented to the jury throughout the four-year trial.
On one occasion, the lawsuit alleges, Cagle approached Moeinpour and Moeinpour’s daughter in a university parking lot, brandished a pistol and threateningly called her a racial epithet. At least one audio recording presented to the jury included Cagle calling Moeinpour that same slur on a separate occasion.
One witness, a mall security guard, described a similar encounter where Cagle followed Moeinpour and her daughter around the mall and again called them racial epithets.
There were numerous similar other encounters between Cagle and Moeinpour described in the lawsuit.
Lawyers for Moeinpour provided the jury with documentation of Moeinpour’s repeated attempts to flag her harassment with human resources over the years.
The lawsuit said the harassment culminated in 2020 when Moeinpour told the head of the lab, Clinton Grubbs, that she was going to report Cagle to the department chair.
In his office, Grubbs implored Moeinpour not to report Cagle again, according to the suit, and told her that “Cagle was…
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