A Kentucky man is about to be $450,000 richer after an employer went against his wishes and threw him a birthday party.
Back in August 2019, Kevin Berling, an employee at Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, Kentucky, told his office manager that he didn’t want a birthday celebration put together for him, mentioning that having a lot of attention on him causes him an immense amount of stress.
When his birthday came on Aug. 7, 2021, the employer threw him a party anyway as a company luncheon. According to WLKY, Berling suffered a panic attack after learning about the surprise party. WSOC-TV reports Berling ended up going to his car for the lunch period. He later sent his office manager a text message, and Berling was called into a meeting that next day.
“The person who was responsible for the birthday parties who he talked to flat out forgot about his request,” said Berling’s attorney, Tony Bucher in an interview with Link NKY. “She didn’t do it to be mean. She said she would accommodate it and she just forgot.”
During their meeting, the employer allegedly told Berling that he stole the other workers’ joy because he was uncomfortable with the party.
“According to my client, she started reading him the riot act and accused him of stealing other co-workers’ joy,” said Bucher to NKY. The meeting brought about another panic attack within Berling and that’s when he asked for the conversation to be over. “The way (the Gravity Diagnostics employees) say it, they believed he was enraged and possibly about to get violent,” Bucher said.
By the end of it, Berling was sent home for two days, and that weekend he was sent a notice that he’d been terminated due to the previous “events of the previous week.”
After that, Berling filed a lawsuit against Gravity Diagnostics, claiming disability discrimination and retaliation. He was later awarded $450,000 by the jury, which included $300,000 for emotional distress and $150,000 for a loss of wages.
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