The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it would not review a June 1999 decision by a federal judge in Bangor awarding former U-Haul employee Karen Romano $300,000 for sex discrimination.
Romano, now 35, had sued U-Haul Co. of Maine and its parent company, U-Haul International, when she was fired in May 1996 two weeks after she was hired as a customer-service specialist in the company’s Waterville branch. Her duties included being trained to install trailer hitches.
At the time of her discharge, the Waterville U-Haul Center manager had told Romano that upper management had ordered her termination because, “You sit when you pee.”
A federal jury awarded Romano $640,000 in damages in a June 1999 verdict. The award subsequently was reduced to $300,000, the cap placed on most civil rights actions.
U-Haul appealed the verdict, but in December 2000 the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld the Bangor federal court’s decision.
In May 2001, U-Haul sought review of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a prepared statement, Romano’s attorney, Jeffrey Young of Topsham, said the Supreme Court’s decision “marks the end of a very long road for Karen Romano.”
U-Haul “discriminatorily terminated my client because it did not believe that a woman could successfully work as a hitch mechanic. … The jury properly punished U-Haul for its sexist thinking,” Young stated.
The attorney said U-Haul “needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”
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