BET Wants Ex Employee Discrimination Lawsuit Dismissed

BET Wants Ex Employee Lawsuit Dismissed

BET has asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that its former employee Zola Mashariki filed last month. This week, the network filed court documents noting that,

BET respectfully requests that the Court dismiss Mashariki’s Complaint in its entirety, and, as for Mashariki’s second and eighth claims, as asserted against [former BET president of programming Stephen] Hill, and her eighteenth claim for defamation, that these claims be dismissed with prejudice. 

Their attorney (attorney Elena Baca of L.A.’s Paul Hastings LLP) added,

The Complaint is filled with inflammatory argument and unsupported legal conclusion. Mashariki compounds the confusion — likely to mask the fact that Viacom has been improperly joined — by conflating Viacom and BET (collectively referring to both as ‘the Company’) throughout the Complaint.

The docs deny that Viacom could be seen as Mashariki’s employer noting:

As for Mashariki’s single, non-employment claim (defamation), despite adding Viacom to the claim, she fails to allege that any person authorized to speak for Viacom said anything about her, at all. Mashariki may argue she alleged Viacom ‘made, approved, and ratified’ BET’s actions. This gets her nowhere. Such allegations are properly discarded as unwarranted conclusions; they are neither facts nor supported by facts.

In addition to BET’s filings, Viacom also submitted paperwork in front of the court to end the case.

Viacom respectfully requests Mashariki’s claims against it be dismissed with prejudice.

As previously reported, Zola Mashariki is suing BET and parent company Viacom with a gender-discrimination and wrongful-termination lawsuit. Click here for the backstory. BET’s attorney has requested a June 17 hearing on the motion to shut the whole case down.

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