NYC PIX 11 anchor claims she was treated like ‘slave’ before firing: lawsuit
An Emmy Award-winning black journalist accused PIX11 of treating her like a “slave” on a “plantation” before she was fired for speaking out about alleged racial discrimination in the newsroom, according to a blistering lawsuit against the New York TV channel.
Ojinika Obiekwe, 46, a Nigerian-born journalist who worked at the Nexstar-owned news station for more than 20 years, claimed she was given less help than white colleagues — which forced her to do the job of two or three people.
“All that’s left for me to do at this point is pick cotton,” she would say at work, discussing her disproportionately heavy workload, according to the lawsuit filed last month in the Southern District of New York.
“This might as well be a plantation,” she regularly said, according to the lawsuit.
After a 2017 promotion, Obiekwe said she noticed two white men with her same role at sister stations owned by Nexstar had less work to do and “were receiving more and better staffing support,” the complaint alleged.
The entertainment anchor and reporter performed tasks usually given to a segment producer or copy editor – even as the two white men earned a higher salary, she claimed.
She started complaining openly about the disparity in 2020.
The following year, she submitted a complaint to Nexstar’s human resources department and had a meeting with Nicole Tindiglia, who had been newly hired as the channel’s news director, according to court documents.
Tindiglia vowed to investigate Obiekwe’s claims and make changes to better support her – but “those were empty promises,” the lawsuit alleged.
Obiekwe continued to loudly complain about her working conditions, the suit said.
“Just call me Django,” she would say, referring to the titular slave character in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, according to the suit. “But even Django was unchained.”
According to the lawsuit, she would remark: “I thought slavery was abolished.”
Around fall 2022, Tindiglia called Obiekwe in for a meeting and allegedly told her the inflammatory rhetoric was “making people uncomfortable,” the suit said.
When people think of “slavery,” they think of “whips and chains,” the news director allegedly said during the meeting.
Tindiglia fired Obiekwe in January 2023 for “failing to perform job duties” and “insubordination.”
When Obiekwe’s SAG-AFTRA union lawyers pushed the network to provide proof that the news anchor had failed to perform her job duties, her former employers were allegedly unable to deliver evidence.
Tindiglia later rescinded those claims, according to the suit.
The news anchor hired Andrew G. Celli, Jr. and Eric Abrams, lawyers at New York-based law firm ECBAWM, to represent her.
She is seeking unspecified damages.
The Post reached out to PIX11 for comment.
