"From the earliest days after its founding in the 1930s, the Screen Actors Guild has been concerned with the problems of inequality and the stereotyping of performers of color."
That's the opening statement of the Screen Actors Guild's website page dedicated to its long history of affirmative action. And the guild in recent years has shown a concerted effort at maintaining that concern. In 1999, it began running ads in trades, promoting diversity in casting; it regularly issues casting-data reports, and it has commissioned two major studies on casting diversity in film and TV.
But the guild in 2001 has also found itself being challenged on color stereotyping, not by its members but by three minority employees fired this year. These employees have filed three separate multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the union for wrongful termination and racial bias, the most recent entered in court books last week.
Two of the employees were the Affirmative Action Department's supervisors: Patricia Metoyer, the executive administrator, and Peter Nguyen, an executive assistant who also served as a strike coordinator during SAG's bitter six-month commercials-contract walkout. The third employee, who filed her suit last week, was former secretary Kelley Langford. All three suits were filed over the last two months in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Metoyer was suspended in late March, according to SAG sources, following an audit that turned up irregularities. SAG officials reported that Price-Waterhouse-Coopers performed the audit, and found that Metoyer had authorized payments to several friends, associates, and family members, including a $2,500 payment to a company owned by her husband and a $20,000 payment to a business associate.
But, in her lawsuit, Metoyer called the audit "only a pretext for firing her." She claims her discipline came "in retaliation" for her complaints about the guild's discriminating actions against its own employees.
Metoyer's suit says she "discovered that SAG was disseminating false statistics about the racial makeup of SAG employees to give the impression that its employment of minorities was higher than it actually was; SAG retaliated, cutting her staff; in mid-to-late March 2001, someone gave a number of publications information that [the] plaintiff was being investigated or audited by SAG for improprieties connected with grant monies; a SAG officer at a board meeting in late March said [the] plaintiff was a criminal who embezzled money from a business she used to work for; an audit was initiated, but allegations are totally false."
Nguyen's lawsuit said that while at SAG he had "witnessed and become aware of numerous discriminatory practices in the workplace; former SAG employees were filing suit, SAG members were making an increased number of complaints, and a group of 'concerned SAG employees' repeatedly wrote letters to management and the board of directors raising issues of discrimination and harassment."
Nguyen's suit said he had applied for the executive associate's position in the Affirmative Action Department, but his application was "met with resistance and hostility" from Leonard Chassman, SAG/Hollywood's executive director, and John McGuire, the guild's associate national executive director.
Nguyen called his firing "based upon completely false allegations, without any chance to rebut them." He has filed his lawsuit against SAG, Chassman, and McGuire, seeking damages for claims including wrongful termination, racial discrimination and harassment, breach of contract, and fraud due to intentional misrepresentation.
According to Nguyen's suit, another Affirmative Action Department employee, Celine Boa, who is Asian-American, was "terminated within days" of Nguyen's firing. There's no record of her having filed a lawsuit yet.
Langford, who is seeking $2 million in damages, said in her filing that she is of African-American and Polynesian descent, and had worked for SAG since 1993.
According to SAG's National Communications office in Los Angeles, the guild is reviewing the court documents but has yet to file its answers.
Roger Armbrust writes for Back Stage.