Fired Editor Says People Magazine “Intentionally Focuses On Stories About White People”; Sues for Discrimination

The very first issue of People magazine was printed in 1974.  It’s been nearly 40 years and there’s hasn’t been many advances in the area of diversity within the brand. However, People recently hired their first Black Senior Editor. Her name is Tatsha Robertson. Unfortunately, for her, the excitement of her new position quickly diminished.

According to the NY Daily New, Robertson joined People after leaving her post over at Essence magazine.  At People, the 48-year old claims that she was mistreated by her boss and that the poplar magazine was biased against African-Americans.

People is “a discriminatory organization run entirely by white people who intentionally focus the magazine on stories involving white people and white celebrities,” Tatsha Robertson’s bombshell lawsuit says.

The 48-year-old Robertson, “the only Black Senior Editor the magazine has ever had,” was laid off in May, according to the suit.

She says only five of the mag’s 110 employees were black, and that now-former executive editor Betsy Gleick treated her like a second class-citizen when she came to the magazine from another Time Inc. publication, Essence, in 2010.

“You need to talk like everyone else here. You’re not at Essence anymore,” Gleick is quoted in the suit as saying.

She says Gleick left her out of important meetings, and denigrated her attempts to do more stories on black people. Robertson said when she pitched a story about an African-American model who’d been killed, Gleick told her the victim looked like a “slut” and the magazine wasn’t interested.

Also in Robertson’s lawsuit, she lists statistical data that points out People’s history and its lack of Black covers/stories over the years.

When the magazine does put black people on its cover, they’re held to a different standard, the suit says. Although People “put Trayvon Martin on its cover, Ms. Gleick was completely obsessed with attempting to unearth any potential negative fact about him before doing so,” the suit says. “Ms. Gleick repeatedly questioned whether he was a ‘good kid,’ yet never made efforts to vet white victims of crime.”

Cover stories on African-Americans were a rarity — the suit says a “black individual was the main feature” on the cover “exactly twice” in 2013, when the magazine put out 60 issues.

“In total since 2010, only 14 out of 265 covers have been focused on African-American individuals,” the suit says.

And since 1990, “only three individuals selected as the ‘Most Beautiful Person’ have been black, out of 25 selections.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ex-black-editor-sues-people-discrimination-claims-article-1.1911165#ixzz3B5X7U8na