Canadian in widely-shared Central Park video loses appeal over Franklin Templeton firing Bob Van Voris, Bloomberg News This May 25, 2020 file image, taken from video provided by Christian Cooper, shows Amy Cooper with her dog calling police at Central Park in New York. (Christian Cooper via AP) Franklin Resources Inc. won’t face discrimination and defamation claims from a woman it fired after a video of her calling the police on a Black birdwatcher in New York’s Central Park went viral. The federal appeals court in New York declined to revive a lawsuit by Amy Cooper, who was fired as head of insurance investment after she became famous as the “Central Park Karen” in a confrontation with the birdwatcher while she was walking her dog. Cooper claimed she was illegally fired and falsely characterized as a racist. Franklin Resources does business as Franklin Templeton. A three-judge panel of the court rejected her appeal on Thursday, agreeing with a lower-court judge that the asset manager didn’t fire her on the basis of race. Cooper “fails to allege facts giving rise to even a minimal inference of discriminatory motivation with respect to her termination,” the court said in a written opinion. The panel also agreed that any statements from Franklin were protected opinion based on the widely viewed video of her encounter with the birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, who is unrelated to her. The court telegraphed last month that it was unlikely to revive the case, in skeptical questioning of her lawyer when the appeal was argued in Manhattan. U.S. Circuit Judge Barrington D. Parker at one point suggested Cooper had “geared it up” by mentioning the birdwatcher’s race in her 911 call claiming he was threatening her. “She pressed the red button, didn’t she?” Parker said. The case is Cooper v. Franklin Templeton Investments, 22-02763, 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals (Manhattan). --With assistance from Annelise Gilbert and Chris Dolmetsch.
Meanwhile..... The Central Park Birder, Christian Cooper, Hosts New National Geographic Wildlife Show The star of 'Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper' explores the birds of the United States, from Hawaii to Palm Springs and Puerto Rico, and says that he moved on quickly from the 2020 viral incident in which a white woman called the police on him: “Maybe it’s just being Black in America, but you develop a fairly thick skin.” June 6, 2023 Christian Cooper on an episode of his new series with a trained Harris’s hawk in Palm Desert, California. Courtesy of National Geographic/Jon Kroll “Through a strange twist of fate, I had become the most famous birder in America, which is not hard because who the hell knows who birders are in the first place,” says Christian Cooper, of gaining national attention in 2020 when a white woman in Central Park called the cops on him after he asked her to leash her dog in a protected wildlife area. It’s an incident “I psychologically moved on [from] three minutes later,” he says. “Maybe it’s just being Black in America, but you develop a fairly thick skin.” (The incident inspired the founding of Black Birders Week, now in its fourth year.)