ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The verdict has been decided in a federal discrimination lawsuit filed by a former Allentown employee against the city.<\/p>\n
Former Allentown human resources employee Karen Ocasio went to court this week, claiming that she was fired because she was outspoken on the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination within the city’s workforce.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the jury ruled that Karen Ocasio was retaliated against, while also ruling that the city had legitimate reason to fire her.<\/p>\n
Officials say the city is not being held liable as a result of this verdict, which comes on day three of Ocasio\u2019s trial.<\/p>\n
Closing arguments took place from both Ocasio’s attorney and the city’s legal team on Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
The city’s defense team said during closing arguments that the Mayor has no animosity and never had an agenda against the former employee.<\/p>\n
Ocasio’s attorney says she was a good employee and cited testimony from a former HR director who agreed with this statement.<\/p>\n
Ocasio\u2019s attorney says they are weighing their next steps.<\/p>\n
69 News reporter Jack Reinhard will have more on this case coming up on 69 News at 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The verdict has been decided in a federal discrimination lawsuit filed by a former Allentown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":["post-287649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}