Bilal El-Amine, 33, thought he was on a roll when he
landed a $20-an-hour freelance gig at Avon Products, Inc., last fall. El-Amine
recalls that he quickly pleased his boss by skillfully proofreading the company’s
brochures, checking product numbers for everything from mascara to Teletubbies.
An employment agency had placed El-Amine at Avon, and he says his supervisor
had invited him to stay on after his trial period ended. But on October 21,
1998— seven weeks after he started at Avon— El-Amine got sacked without an
explanation.
El-Amine began to believe that his dismissal was
related to his involvement in a vigil for Matthew Shepard, the gay college
student who was brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. El-Amine had spent the
night of October 19 locked in a jail cell after cops arrested him and nearly
100 other activists for disorderly conduct at the midtown protest. El-Amine
missed a day of work, told his boss what had occurred, and was unemployed one
day later.
But El-Amine’s tale is hardly a clear-cut case of
alleged discrimination. Avon insists that homophobia has nothing to do with why
El-Amine lost his job. An attorney who El-Amine hired, Robert W. Ottinger, says
Avon gave him a far more bizarre explanation: El-Amine lost his job because he
masturbated in the office bathroom. El-Amine denies this claim. He is planning
to file a lawsuit in State Supreme Court this week charging Avon with both
discriminating against him for his political activism and defaming him with
accusations of public masturbation.
El-Amine: Did arrest at a Matthew Shepard vigil cost
him his job?
Seated in his attorneys’ office last week, El-Amine
looked like a typical graduate student. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and a button
proclaiming “End the Sanctions Now! Hands off Iraq.” In fact, El-Amine has a
master’s degree in international affairs from Georgetown University, and was
until recently pursuing a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. A
longtime member of the International Socialist Organization, El-Amine sees his
lawsuit against Avon as yet another political battle.
“I wanted to force them to at least say, ‘We fired
him for his political activity,’” says El-Amine. “And then this pops out of the
box. It’s an insidious charge because it’s your word against someone else’s
word. And heck, anyone is a pervert. What shocked me immediately is that here
we were accusing them of homophobia and so on, and then they use the classic
homophobic slur— oversexed man doing it in the bathroom.”
Ottinger, who works at the law firm Dienst & Serrins,
says that the masturbation charge first surfaced during a December phone
conversation he had with Donna Edbril, Avon’s senior assistant general counsel.
Ottinger says Edbril told him that an Avon vice president had seen El-Amine
masturbate. “The guy says he was standing at the urinal and . . . he looked
over and Bilal masturbated all the way to fruition and then the person saw a
puddle of semen below the urinal,” Ottinger says.
Avon’s attorney would not confirm or deny this
explanation for El-Amine’s dismissal. “I’m not at liberty to tell you why,”
Edbril says. “We told the agency that we no longer needed his services, which
we have every right to do.”
When asked about El-Amine’s claim of discrimination,
Edbril grows enraged. “It’s simply ludicrous,” she says. “Look at how many
people in the creative agency are openly gay! There were people in that
department . . . who are Avon employees [and] who were given time off to
participate in that demonstration.”
Edbril insists that Avon has a strong record on gay
issues. “We have a gay and lesbian network [for employees] here,” she says. “We
just came out with a benefits package where domestic partners are [covered]. I
mean, how can this possibly be a place that discriminates against someone for
participation? . . . It’s crazy. It’s downright defamatory. I don’t know what
his motives are, [but] it’s simply not true. It’s very damaging to the company
to have such publicity, and the company doesn’t deserve it. . . . We will fight
this tooth and nail.”
El-Amine is not the first person to be fired for
allegedly masturbating on the job. In 1995, the New York City Transit Authority
terminated a subway train operator after a passenger spotted him masturbating
while driving the train. “An employer is free to fire someone for that kind of
behavior,” says Randolph E. Wills, deputy commissioner for law enforcement at
the city’s Commission on Human Rights. “The general rule in New York State is
that you can be fired for anything or nothing at all as long as it’s not
discriminatory.”
When Sean Sweeney heard that El-Amine had been
accused of masturbating at work, he was shocked. Sweeney, who heads the Queens
College Worker Education Extension Center, was El-Amine’s boss from 1994 to
1997 when El-Amine taught urban studies in Sweeney’s program. About the
masturbation charge, Sweeney says, “It’s completely uncharacteristic. I’m sure
a lot of people have done that before. [But] I can’t imagine him doing it. . .
. He’s basically a good teacher and a good guy— dedicated politically but not
someone who is [in] any way strange or unpredictable.”
For his part, El-Amine says he cannot figure out what
led Avon to accuse him of public masturbation. Sometimes he wonders if this
whole saga started with a puddle in the bathroom. “The only thing I could
possibly connect it to was that [Avon’s] urinals are automatic,” he says. “They
would always flush while I was standing in front of them. . . . The water would
always splash down on me. Or, if I stepped aside, it would just splash down on
the floor.”
Research assistance: Hillary Chute
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