Image via WikipediaA Superior Court jury said this afternoon there was no age discrimination in the selection of The Record's food editor in 2006 or retaliation in the firing of Victor E. Sasson for filing a lawsuit against executives and managers.
Sasson, author of "Eye on The Record," represented himself at the trial, in consultation with Joshua L. Weiner, the plaintiff's Morristown attorney since last summer. (Photo: Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack.)
Jennifer A. Borg, a defendant, and Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg were in court to hear the 8-0 verdict shortly after 5 p.m. The jury of four women and four men, all of whom were allowed to deliberate, returned their decision after only an hour of discussion.
The elder Borg, chairman of North Jersey Media Group, is over 70. During breaks, he was asked about his childhood in Hackensack, where he lived in a home at Summit and Fairmount avenues. He said his father bought the house and many acres of land behind it during the Depression. He was born in 1938.
Jennifer Borg, who attended the trial every day and testified, would not allow Mac to comment on the color photo that ran in the Woodland Park paper yesterday showing a woman making an obscene gesture at the photographer.
At trial, NJMG was represented by Samuel J. Samaro, a veteran litigator who heads the employment practice of Pashman Stein in Hackensack. He said he billed "in the vicinity" of $300 to $400 an hour, and boasted of a $1 million settlement he won in a sex-bias case filed by two women who were William Paterson University professors. His said his fee exceeded the money paid to the plaintiffs.
"You're in my house now," he said during a break in the proceedings this week, referring to the courtroom.
Judge Joseph S. Conte in Hackensack said the plaintiff did a "fine job" for a pro se, but noted it was a "tough case." The eight-day trial began March 29.
The judge preserved NJMG's right to file suit against "Eye on The Record," about the fourth or fifth time such an action has been threatened. Samaro alleged recent comments in the blog about the elder Borg constituted "a threat."
Weiner said he looked forward to defending Sasson, a former news copy editor and freelance food writer for The Record, and the blog. Sasson's lawsuit was served on the defendants in January 2008.
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My sincere condolences. This was age bias if ever I saw it. If nothing else, you demonstrated what a bunch of assholes run the newsroom. And for the Record, the victory will eventually prove pyrrhic, because the paper lost its most valuable asset -- decades of editorial experience -- to save a few dollars. The product has suffered exponentially since.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all your help, Aaron. Unfortunately, the jury did not believe my contention that defendant Barbara Jaeger and her pal, lunch companion and former subordinate Liz Houlton lied on the witness stand about what Patricia Mack told them about me. Pat was wonderful and appeared in court the morning after she drove back from Florida. Unfortunately, the judge wouldn't allow her to testify how Jaeger and Editor Frank Scandale hounded her out of the job, and how Inhuman Resources turned a deaf ear to her complaints. She did tell the jury she was taking four blood-pressure medications at one point.
ReplyDeleteI've said it before and I'll say it again: The first page of the Record web site is an absolute disgrace, showing the pictures of eight of its columnists today, every one of them a white male. I don't think there's another paper of the same size in the country that is so blatantly un-diverse.
ReplyDeleteYou, me and many other long-time newsroom employees know all forms of discrimination are practiced there. My comments in this blog about the white male columnists were turned against me at the trial. Did you notice Colleen Diskin won an award for her column, Mother Load, which has been discontinued, along with Virginia Rohan's column about baby boomers? I'll be supplying regular snippets of the testimony from the trial of my lawsuit.
ReplyDeleteyou got your ass handed to you victor-get over it.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, my father is dead. So who are you?
ReplyDeleteAn eight-day trial against a seasoned employment litigator and putting Jennifer and Stephen Borg, Barbara Jaeger and Liz Houlton through depositions and testifying before a jury -- where they showed nervousness and inconsistencies -- is not getting your ass handed to you, Anonymous. The existence of this blog, despite all the Borgs' empty threats, is not getting your ass handed to you. Keeping alive the issue of the editors' mistreatment of older workers is not getting your ass handed to you. It's the defendants' asses that got hauled into a courtroom to explain their shameful behavior toward seasoned journalists.
ReplyDelete