Jonah Lowenfeld writes: The Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica and its owner illegally discriminated against a group of young Jews, a jury in a California Superior Court found on Aug. 15.
The verdict in this closely watched case was read late Wednesday afternoon, at the end of the fifth full day of deliberation by the jury. The jury found that the hotel and its part-owner, Tehmina Adaya, had violated California state law when Adaya and members of her staff brought to an end a party that the plaintiffs had been holding at the hotel’s pool in July 2010.
The jury also decided that most of the plaintiffs had suffered intentionally inflicted emotional distress, and awarded each Adaya and the hotel to pay damages and statutory penalties to each individual plaintiff, which in some cases added up to more than $100,000.
“The jury clearly felt that the defendants acted intentionally, with malice, and discriminated against this group of young Jews, and justice was done,” James Turken, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said after the verdict was read.
Because the jury found that Adaya and the hotel had “acted with malice, oppression or fraud,” punitive damages may still be awarded to at least some of the individual plaintiffs, as well as to the one business entity on the plaintiffs’ side. The jury is scheduled to decide how much to award the plaintiffs on Thursday.
