This is NOT good for Disney’s wholesome image!
The massive conglomerate has been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union because the company allegedly fired a Muslim employee at Disneyland in 2010 because she wore her hijab headscarf at work.
Even before being terminated, Imane Boudlal says she received insults from her employees AND supervisors because of her religion, origin and skin color. In fact, some went so far as to call her a terrorist, a camel and a bitch all while they carelessly accused Arabs of being terrorists and bombmakers.
The worst part of the allegations against the corporation is that managers and executives didn’t seem to care about the prejudiced comments. CLU chief counsel Mark Rosenbaum elaborated:
├óΓé¼┼ôWhen she reported these attacks to her Disney managers, she was told that she had to put up with them, told that Disney knew there was a problem, but that the solution was the directive from her bosses that she needed to stop complaining.”
Woah! So not cool!
Obvi, we don’t have both sides of the story yet so we can’t really judge either party. For Disney’s part, a spokeswoman has said:
“Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has a long history of accommodating a variety of religious requests from cast members of all faiths. However, because we have not seen the lawsuit, we cannot comment specifically about this situation at this time.”
The odds in this case may be on the plaintiff’s side because an employee at Florida’s Disney World resort sued for the same reason in 2004 and eventually settled out of court. Still, it is just her word against her teams … and is it bad of us to just want to believe that this kind of bigotry can’t really exist, especially at the happiest place on Earth?
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