Electric car maker Tesla has been ordered to pay a black former worker nearly $3.2million (£2.6million) after winning a racial harassment lawsuit.
Owen Diaz, an elevator operator from 2015 to 2016 at his Fremont factory, was exposed to an anti-racial work environment, a federal jury found.
However, the payment was reduced by 98% from the $137 million he was originally awarded in 2021.
A judge ruled last year that the original amount was too high.
On Monday, Mr. Diaz was awarded $3 million in punitive damages and $175,000 in damages for emotional distress.
“If we had been allowed to bring in new evidence, the verdict would have been imo zero,” said Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter.
“The jury did their best with the information available to them. I respect the decision,” he added.
Mr Musk did not provide details of what new evidence Tesla would have presented.
Tesla’s attorney, Alex Spiro, declined to comment. The company did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment.
In the original lawsuit, Mr. Diaz alleged that African-American workers at the company’s Fremont, California plant “encountered a scene straight out of the Jim Crow era.”
He claimed that black workers were regularly confronted with racist slurs on factory floors and racist graffiti in bathrooms.
The lawsuit also said employees would label areas where black or African-American employees worked with racially historical names, such as “plantation.”
It was alleged that a worker heard racial slurs “50 to 100 times a day”.
In 2021, a federal court in San Francisco found that Tesla failed to take adequate steps to address the abuse, despite complaints to supervisors.
The jury awarded Mr. Diaz $137 million in damages. At the time Tesla disputed the verdict but said it was “not perfect”.
In April 2022, a US federal judge reduced Mr. Diaz’s award to $15 million, saying the award decided by the jury was “extremely high.”
Bernard Alexander, a lawyer for Mr Diaz, said last week: ‘Mr Diaz’s view of the world has changed permanently. That’s what happens when you deprive a person of security.”
Mr. Alexander asked the jury to award his client nearly $160 million in damages.
However, Tesla’s lawyer, Mr. Spiro, argued that Mr. Diaz’s lawyers had failed to prove that Tesla caused serious, long-lasting damages.
“They just throw numbers on the screen like this is some kind of game show,” Mr Spiro said.
Add Comment