On June 8, a U.S. appeals court ruled against Amy Cooper, a white woman who called the police on a Black man bird-watching at the park in May 2020, Yahoo News, reported. Labeled as “Central Park Karen,” Cooper was fired from her employment following the incident, which went viral accumulating millions of views and backlash.
In the video, Cooper is heard saying, “There’s an African-American man threatening my life.” Her comments came after Christian Cooper requested that Amy Cooper leash her dogs, a rule within the park.
According to Yahoo, Cooper had previously been employed at Franklin Templeton as an insurance portfolio manager. However, she was fired one day after the video’s release following an internal review, in which Templeton stated that “we do not tolerate racism of any kind.”
Amy Cooper brought forth a lawsuit against her former employer in the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, citing wrongful termination. However, her suit was tossed out in a 3-0 decision for her failure to prove that her employer illegally dismissed her on the basis of race or defamed her by branding her as a racist.
The Court maintained that Franklin Templeton’s statements did not mention Cooper’s race and that if reasonable readers thought that it was accusing her of racism, it would be considered an “expression of opinion” based on the video.
Additionally, the court reasoned that the video had been shared “in the midst of an ongoing national reckoning about systemic racism,” as the incident central to the lawsuit occurred on the same day that a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd, a Black man.
Franklin Templeton shared their satisfaction with the decision, saying, “We continue to believe the company responded appropriately.”
This ruling upheld the lower court judge’s decision to dismiss Amy Cooper’s case last September.
This is another installment in Amy Cooper’s three-year attempt to rehabilitate her image, as in August 2021, the former insurance portfolio manager appeared on a podcast, “Honestly With Bari Weiss,” in which she defended her actions on May 20.