Left wingnuttia, just like right wingnuttia...

... i.e., gullible.

The case of Debrahlee Lorenzana, who claims she was fired from Citi for being too attractive, is a case in point. She has made all these claims against specific bank managers, but has nothing to back up these claims other than her own word. Yet left wingnuttia, gullible fools they be, have bought it hook line and sinker.

Sigh... look, anybody can file a claim that makes accusations. That doesn't mean the accusations are true. Crap, Orly Taitz files a claim every other day saying that President Obama is a secret Muslim Nigerian and thus not *really* President, but that doesn't make it true. As much as I agree that Citi is evil, Citi is also a giant bureaucratic corporation and you can be damned sure that if she got fired from Citi, there's a thick file on her telling exactly why, because it's almost impossible to fire someone from those big corporations like that unless you've got everything documented to a fare-the-well. You think it's hard to fire a teacher, you ought to see what it takes to fire a full-time employee of Citi or any other Fortune 500 company. It ain't easy, nosirree, they'll shuffle a person to a different position or to a different department long before they fire that person.

So what does Citi say? "Ms. Lorenzana has chosen to make numerous unfounded accusations and inaccurate statements against Citibank and several of our employees. While we will not discuss the details of her case, we can say that her termination was solely performance-based and not at all related to her appearance or attire. We are confident that when all of the facts and documentation are presented, the claim will be dismissed."

Note that this is *not* the typical non-denial denial that basically says nothing. This is pretty damned specific, which says to me that Citi's law critters think they have a pretty good case. And furthermore, this case is going to be heard by an arbiter, not by a jury, so why the media blitz? Arbiters aren't swayed by media pressure, indeed, a media blitz typically prejudices them against the person. What that tells me is that Ms. Lorenzana already knows she doesn't have a case and will lose when it goes to arbitration, so she's using this opportunity to punish the people who fired her by dragging their name through the mud -- and gullible fools are buying it.

My speculation on why she was fired? Language skills. Watch her interviews on YouTube. She struggles with English pronunciation big-time. She was hired as a business banker in a midtown branch, where the majority of people she met would be white businessmen -- and her English language skills simply weren't up to dealing with them. My bet is that her personnel file is full of complaints from customers demanding to be reassigned to some other representative because they couldn't understand her, at which point she was transferred to a non-customer-facing position -- a typical response of a large corporation to such complaints. My understanding is that she felt that this was punishment and a demotion, and stopped showing up for work regularly, at which point she was fired. Of course, we'll never actually know, since arbitration proceedings are not entered into the public record... but my suspicion is that the arbiter isn't going to take a long time to rule against her, and then she's going to be on the news yet again claiming the arbiter was biased against her because she was "too attractive". Siiiiiigh!

-- Badtux the Skeptical Penguin