A production team hired by Diddy’s Revolt TV in 2014 is claiming reverse discrimination in a new lawsuit.
The production team, made up of Douglas Goodstein and four other all-white producers, are all over the age of 39 years old. They previously worked for “The Howard Stern Show,” and were hired by Revolt TV in January 2014 to work on“The Breakfast Club.” According to the group of men, they were often “treated worse than other employees who were younger and African American.
Douglas Goodstein filed a civil suit in Manhattan claiming that Revolt’s Executive Vice President Val Boreland “was always rude, condescending and dismissive towards the Goodstein Production Team.” Goodstein says that the younger, African-American staff were treated more favorably.
The suit says “African-American employees who arrived to work intoxicated or hung over” never faced punishment for their actions. They even single out a production assistant who “often came to work late, drunk and slept on the editing floor during work hours.
Val Boreland’s brother and the assistant director of the show says that the Caucasians harbored animosity towards the African-American staff, while the lawsuit claims “The animosity Mr. Boreland had towards Caucasians was clear.
53-year-old producer Todd Baker, who claims that he was referred to as “old guy,” says that when he complained that the show’s guests (rappers) arriving late and being “disrespectful” to the production team, he was told by production manager Cherisse McKenzie that “he just did not understand the ‘culture’ of the show’s guests and on-air personalities.
Baker took that as a form of reverse racism, claiming that McKenzie’s “response was clearly referring to African-American culture and/or African-American hip-hop culture, which she assumed Baker did not understand because he was Caucasian.
Baker declares that he did “understand the guests’ attitudes, but he found them to be unprofessional in a television production setting.
The production team was fired in December 2014 and replaced with younger, hipper, black employees who the suit claims are “inexperienced.