Bank of New York Mellon Corp. was sued by a former executive who says the company fired him after more than three decades because of his age and gender and for helping a male colleague file a sexual harassment complaint against a female coworker.
Jonathan Spirgel, BNY Mellon’s former global head of liquidity and segregation services, said in a complaint Friday in federal court in Manhattan that the bank terminated him along with a male colleague in June 2020, but took no action against the female salesperson who was the subject of the complaint after a “sham investigation.”
“The bank purportedly fired Mr. Spirgel because of some alleged ‘misconduct’ that amounted to no more than harmless, trivial, and private banter among colleagues several years earlier about which no one complained,” Spirgel said in his suit. “The firing was carried out without any warning or notice, despite Mr. Spirgel’s dedicated 32-year career working for BNY Mellon marked by unwaveringly exemplary performance and conduct.”
Sprigel, 57, who says he was hired around February 1998, says he was denied a one-year severance payment under his contract because of the bank’s decision to fire him for cause and also had to forfeit $1.25 million of unvested stock.
A spokesperson for the bank said in a statement that the bank looks forward to defending itself in the case.
“We are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that treats employees with fairness, dignity and respect,” the spokesperson said.
Spirgel alleges in his complaint that the woman, who wasn’t identified, committed “egregious misconduct” at a bar while visiting Boston for an industry conference in October 2019. The woman was “highly intoxicated” and “acting erratically” and sat on a male colleague’s lap without invitation.
“The female salesperson proceeded to act in an even more inappropriate manner, including by attempting to show Mr. Spirgel’s male colleague photographs of her mother in revealing outfits, and asking Mr. Spirgel’s male colleague if he thought her mother was ‘hot,’” among other comments, according to Spirgel’s complaint.
The colleague reported the incident to human resources on the advice of Spirgel, his supervisor, and the bank said it was conducting a probe of the incident that led to a verbal warning to the woman despite the fact that she was performing poorly, regularly called out sick and was becoming “exceedingly difficult” for others on the tam to work with, according to the suit.
The woman later left the bank after receiving a settlement in relation to unrelated harassment claims, Spirgel said in his complaint. But he says the bank then began questioning him about a “small handful of off-color comments” he made to colleagues on a WhatsApp chat between 2015 and 2018, including a reference to the “attractiveness of flight attendants on a flight to Asia” and a “joke about how Mr. Spirgel believed a flight attendant was attracted to him simply because she had looked at him.”
A little over a month later, he was fired along with the 56-year-old male colleague who made the complaint, according to the lawsuit.
“Looking to set an ‘example’ in light of the #MeToo movement, and desperate to find a way to quell the mounting internal pressure to improve gender diversity amongst Bank leadership, BNY Mellon resorted to scapegoating and engaging in hostile and discriminatory conduct toward innocent male employees,” according to the lawsuit. “As a result, Mr. Spirgel, as a male executive, was held to an unfair and unlawful double standard when it came to his conduct at BNY Mellon as compared to far more egregious misconduct by female employees.”
The case is Spirgel v Bank of New York Mellon Corp., 23-cv-6082, US District Court, Southern District of New York.
