Warner Bros. Keeps Citing A Black Woman's "Friends" Harassment Lawsuit In HR Training

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...uit-me-too-era

“You cannot have campaigns such as #MeToo and Time's Up if you're still scaring the **** out of people with my case,” the writers' assistant who filed the lawsuit nearly 20 years ago said.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/krystieyandoli

Posted on June 11, 2021 at 5:39 pm

Nearly 20 years ago, Amaani Lyle set out to challenge the sexual harassment and discrimination she said she experienced as a writers’ assistant on the biggest show on television, Friends. But the legacy her journey to the California Supreme Court created hasn’t been what she hoped for all those years ago.

Known widely throughout Hollywood as “the Friends case,” more than a dozen former employees at Warner Bros. say Lyle’s failed lawsuit has been used for years by managers and in HR trainings to impress on new hires that free speech in creative environments is protected, even language that people may consider sexually harassing or insensitive. The message, they add, has a chilling effect when issues of harassment or discrimination come up in the workplace.

“It's a precedent that people are using to indemnify themselves and shirk any accountability,” Lyle told BuzzFeed News.

Warner Bros. declined to comment. But the studio's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, specifically addresses potentially offensive language being part of the creative process.

But Lyle said she felt totally ignored and even retaliated against when she raised her issues. In 2002, she filed a complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing after she was fired from Friends, naming executive producers Adam Chase and Gregory Malins as well as producer Andrew Reich. Chase, Malins, and Reich confirmed at the time that some of Lyle’s claims in her suit were true but said they were not guilty of harassment, adding that their sexual comments were not directed at Lyle and they had been a necessary part of the creative process.

The case quickly became framed as an issue of freedom of speech, and the entertainment industry and First Amendment advocacy organizations rallied against it. The highly publicized case eventually reached the California Supreme Court, and in 2006, a judge ruled that the writers had not violated any law by making sexual comments because they weren’t specifically directed at or said about anyone in the writers room.

Lyle was hired to work as a writers’ assistant on Friends in 1999 for the sixth season of the show. Prior to landing the coveted gig, she attended Emerson University and worked for Nickelodeon on shows like Kenan & Kel and All That. Chase and Malins brought Lyle on to take detailed notes during writers’ brainstorming sessions that they could then look back on when coming up with storylines and dialogue. During her time there, Lyle said the mostly white, male writers made frequent sexual and racist remarks, including graphic details from their own sex lives. While the court ruled the writers were not harassing Lyle because the comments were not directed at her or made about her, she said that she was still tasked with recording every single word mentioned in the room.

“At the time they were saying, ‘Friends is an adult-themed show and it's very private what goes on in this room,’ but now Friends is looped on Nickelodeon. That’s an adult-themed show?”

Lyle said she believes she was fired for suggesting Friends character Joey (Matt LeBlanc) should have a Black love interest to increase diversity on the show and speaking to her superior about a racist joke made by another producer.

It was after these incidents, according to Lyle, that she was told by producers she needed to improve her typing speed, which came as a surprise because she said for many of the writers on staff, she was their favorite assistant.

She initially sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination, but after talking to her lawyer about the sexual remarks and comments in the writers room, Lyle also sued for sexual harassment.

But Lyle wasn’t just up against one of the biggest and most powerful studios in Hollywood. The entertainment industry rallied together to sign a brief in defense of Warner Bros. and the environment in the Friends writers room, arguing a Supreme Court decision in favor of Lyle would “cast a severe chill on the creative process.” The brief was filed by the Writers Guild of America and supported by the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and more than 130 prominent Hollywood producers, writers, and directors, including Norman Lear, Larry David, Laura Kightlinger, and Yvette Denise Lee Bowser.

After getting fired from Friends, Lyle went on to work on a couple smaller projects before leaving the entertainment industry for good, joining the Air Force and working in written communications for the Pentagon. She didn’t have much of a choice, because according to Lyle, “back in the ’90s and the early 2000s, if you said anything, you were pretty much blackballed.”

While she said she doesn’t have any ill will toward the Friends franchise or the stars of the show, she wishes Warner Bros. would stop using the case as a precedent to intimidate other employees out of reporting incidents of sexual harassment. More than a dozen former employees have told BuzzFeed News that the Lyle case has been cited in sexual harassment training, adding that the message was clear: Reporting a colleague or superior for making sexual remarks or comments that might make employees feel uncomfortable is no easy task.

CLIFFS:: black woman who was hired to take notes from Friends' writers sued WB for wrongful termination and sexual harassment after she complained to HR about the language used by the writers. WB retaliated by firing her. The writers would make racist remarks and even talk about their sex life. She lost and WB now uses her case to intimidate new hires that speech is protected and to suck it up.