Starbucks to Pay $25.6M to Ex Manager Who Claimed She Was Fired for Being White Following Viral Arrest of Black Customers

A former Starbucks regional manager is set to receive a massive payday after a jury found her favor following her lawsuit claiming she was terminated for being white.

Shannon Phillips, who had worked for the company for 13 years, sued the coffee chain in 2019 after being fired following the high-profile arrest of two Black men at a Philly location in 2018.

Back in April 2018, a manager at a Philadelphia Starbucks called the police on Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, who were sitting in the coffee shop without making a purchase. The men declined to leave as they said they were waiting on a business colleague and were eventually removed from the premises in cuffs. That incident went viral and sparked protests and outrage. Although Phillips, a regional manager in Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, wasn’t directly involved in the arrests, she ended up losing her job less than a month later after she objected to a white manager being put on leave in the midst of the controversy.

In her lawsuit, Philips said she was let go because she is white, claiming Starbucks was attempting to “punish white employees who had not been involved in the arrests, but who worked in and around the city of Philadelphia, in an effort to convince the community that it had properly responded to the incident,” AP reports. Per the complaint, the reason for her termination was that “‘the situation is not recoverable.'” It argued the reasoning was a “pre-text for race discrimination” and that her “race was a motivating and/or determinative factor in [Starbucks’] discriminatory treatment.”

Wednesday, a jury found Starbucks liable under New Jersey state and federal law and awarded $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.