Former Fox29 anchor, fired for using racial epithet, loses lawsuit

To hear his lawyers tell it, former Fox29 anchor Tom Burlington was fired because he, a white man, dared to use a racial epithet while discussing the word with black coworkers, who sometimes used it themselves.

A federal jury disagreed and on Monday rejected the one-time newsman's racial discrimination lawsuit against his former employer.

The verdict came after a trial in which the all-white panel was asked to decide who in the newsroom had used "the n-word" before, how many times, and whether there was ever a situation in which a white person could appropriately use it.

"I can't believe that in this day and age, he didn't have an idea that using the full n-word in the workplace was outrageous, and it didn't matter the context," Jerome Hoffman, lawyer for Fox29, said in his closing argument to jurors.

He declined to comment after the verdict. So, too, did Burlington, 53, who quickly left the courtroom with his wife as soon as the jurors were dismissed.

During testimony last week, Burlington said he apologized to several colleagues after learning that they were offended by his language during a 2007 newsroom discussion of an NAACP event at which group members ceremonially "buried" the word.

"Does that mean we can finally say the word 'n-?' " Burlington asked his coworkers at the time. Several testified that he repeated the word while apologizing to them later.

When a black employee questioned his use of the slur, Burlington said he believed that saying "the n-word" rather than the word itself gave the racial epithet more power.

"He didn't realize that people were offended by the word itself," his lawyer, Laura Mattiacci, said. "Maybe he was naive, but he wasn't malicious."

But that is where Burlington's version and that of station management diverged.

The ex-anchor maintains that tensions escalated when his one-time coanchor Joyce Evans, who is black, heard about the conversation and mounted a campaign to get Burlington fired.

She encouraged others to complain to human resources, and told her bosses she had fielded complaints about Burlington from the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists, and people on the street, Mattiacci said.

When all that was not enough to prompt his ouster, Burlington's lawyer insinuated Monday, word of Burlington's comments was leaked to several local newspapers, including the Bucks County Courier Times and the Philadelphia Daily News.

During her testimony last week, Evans denied plotting against Burlington.

But station managers agreed that negative publicity was the determining factor in their decision not to renew his contract. They pulled him from the air in July of that year and paid him $90,000 for the time remaining on his employment agreement.

"They had a serious problem with an employee who didn't get it, and they had to do something about it," Hoffman said.

Burlington, who argued that his bosses' decision was mired in a double standard that did not apply equally to black employees, has been working as a Main Line real estate agent since he lost his six-figure job at Fox. He had asked for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from the station.

He settled a separate defamation lawsuit against the Daily News in Chester County Court in 2013.

"For the past eight years, he's been out there on the street, trying to sell houses, trying to salvage his reputation one person at a time," Mattiacci said. "What is eight years of being labeled a racist worth?"

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