February 22, 2025
Obiekwe is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who labored for the corporate for over 20 years.
Ojinika Obiekwe, an Emmy Award-winning Black journalist, has filed a lawsuit towards PIX11 for allegedly treating her like a “slave on a plantation” and wrongfully firing her for talking out towards the pervasive racial discrimination of their newsroom. The lawsuit towards the New York-based TV channel lists that she is searching for unspecified damages.
Obiekwe additionally factors out the alleged racial discrimination she felt she skilled at PIX11 within the newsroom. She would say at work, “All that’s left for me to do at this level is decide cotton.”
In accordance to The New York Publish, she defined that she acquired a disproportionately heavy workload and fewer assist than her white counterparts.
The 46-year-old Nigerian-born journalist, who labored on the PIX11 information station for over 20 years, claimed she was compelled to do the job of two or three individuals with little assist.
After receiving a promotion in 2017, Obiekwe stated she observed two white males, significantly who had the identical position as her at sister stations, “had been receiving extra and higher staffing assist” and had much less work.
Based on the lawsuit, Obiekwe stated of the station, “This would possibly as effectively be a plantation.”
Obiekwe said that as an leisure anchor and reporter, she additionally accomplished duties normally given to a section producer or copy editor. With the added work, the 2 white males nonetheless allegedly earned a better wage than she did.
She stated she was vocal concerning the mistreatment she felt she acquired at work, and it escalated in 2020.
“Simply name me Django. However even Django was unchained,” she would say at PIX11. “I believed slavery was abolished.”
The subsequent 12 months Obiekwe submitted a proper criticism to PIX11 Nexstar’s human assets division and at last had a gathering with Nicole Tindiglia, who was the channel’s information director. Though Tindiglia claimed she would look into Obiekwe’s grievances, she allegedly by no means did, in keeping with the lawsuit.
As a substitute, in 2022 Tindiglia known as a gathering with Obiekwe and allegedly informed her that her fixed race rhetoric was “making individuals uncomfortable.”
Tindiglia then fired Obiekwe in January of the subsequent 12 months for “failing to carry out job duties and insubordination,” the lawsuit states.
Obiekwe’s lawsuit claims that the firing was retaliation for her talking out towards the racial discrimination in PIX11’s practices, and her SAG-AFTRA union attorneys have claimed that the that the information anchor’s former employers have failed to offer proof of Obiekwe failing to carry out her job duties.
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