Amy Cooper — the white New York woman who went viral last year for calling the police on a Black man named Christian Cooper who was birdwatching in Central Park last Memorial Day — is now suing her former employer for alleged racial and gender discrimination. The complaint was filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, May 25, exactly a year after Amy Cooper was caught in a verbal dispute with Cooper, a birdwatcher, during which she falsely claimed to police that an “African American man” was threatening her and her dog. Amy Cooper, who formerly worked for Franklin Templeton, was an insurance portfolio manager. She claims in the suit that Christian was “an overzealous birdwatcher engaged in Central Park’s ongoing feud between birdwatchers and dog owners.”
As expected, the video gained traction via social media after several instances of white women calling the police on Black men and women popped up on social media in the last few years. Cooper believes that Franklin Templeton gave in to the public push for her company oust. “Franklin Templeton perpetuated and legitimized the story of ‘Karen’ vs. an innocent African American to its perceived advantage, with reckless disregard for the destruction of Plaintiff’s life in the process,” her attorney Matthew Litt writes in the suit. The company said in a statement after the incident that it was conducting an investigation. But Amy Cooper says she was never contacted about an internal probe. The company would have performed a fair investigation were it not for Amy Cooper’s gender and race, she argues. Her personal and professional life have been destroyed, according to the suit. “We believe the circumstances of the situation speak for themselves and that the Company responded appropriately. We will defend against these baseless claims,” Franklin Templeton says in a statement.
Amy Cooper was criminally charged with falsely reporting an incident. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she frantically says in the viral video. The charge was dismissed in February after she attended therapy sessions. A few days after the initial incident Christian Cooper publicly accepted Amy Cooper’s apology on The View. “I do accept her apology,” Christian Cooper says. “I think it’s a first step. I think she’s gotta do some reflection on what happened because up until the moment when she made that statement. It was just a conflict between a birder and a dog walker, and then she took it to a very dark place. I think she’s gotta sort of examine why and how that happened.”
