A 36-year Orange County Register employee fired in October from her job as an advertising account executive filed a lawsuit this month against the newspaper and its parent company, Freedom Communications, alleging age discrimination.
Laura Meyers claims she was fired at the age of 53 “without good cause” after compiling a “good record of employment, including her generally consistent success in meeting reasonable sales quota expectations,” according to the lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court.
Meyers' manager at the Register told her he was terminating her from the job because she was “not on plan.”
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But Meyers, who began working at the Register in Sept. 1977, noted that her 1996 performance evaluation labeled her an employee that “knows more about the Register than most which enables her to successfully problem solve and get things done.”
A 2003 management evaluation called her “a grand Register ambassador.”
Meyers, who earned between $93,000 and $123,000 annually in recent years, claims newer management manufactured criticism to build a false case of poor performance, according to the lawsuit.
She calculated her firing cost her $892,200 in future earnings and benefits, and is hoping an eventual jury agrees.
The case, which has not yet drawn an official response from Register lawyers, is assigned to Superior Court Judge David Chaffee in Santa Ana.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.