CVN screenshot of defense attorney Daniel Kessler delivering his closing argument
Los Angeles, CA - A California state court jury returned a defense verdict Monday in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a former Ralphs Grocery employee who claimed he was fired after complaining about failure to accommodate his religious obligations, and the full trial was recorded gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network.
The Los Angeles County jury reached their decision in a trial that began July 18. Plaintiff Mohamed Saifudeen accused Kroger-owned Ralphs of not allowing him time off to take his children to religious school on Saturdays or to observe holidays like Ramadan and then firing him in 2016 in retaliation for lodging complaints with his union representatives.
Saifudeen’s attorneys sought roughly $7.2 million in damages, but attorneys for Ralphs successfully argued management at the company repeatedly made reasonable scheduling accommodations for Saifudeen, and that he was legally terminated due to insubordination and poor job performance.
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The long-running case, first filed in 2018, hinged on whether or not Ralphs ran afoul of California’s employment discrimination laws in making their final decision to terminate Saifudeen - a 25-year-employee of the company - following an incident where he arrived late for work and then left without his manager’s permission to pick up his child from school.
Saifudeen claimed those events followed years of hostile treatment at multiple Ralphs locations, where he was allegedly subject to demeaning comments about his religious observances and suspended and reinstated multiple times for relatively minor infractions like misplacing a barcode scanner, that he argued should have resulted in less severe disciplinary actions.
Saifudeen alleged his final termination in 2016 caused him “severe emotional distress” and prompted him to develop clinical depression, but attorneys for Ralphs argued throughout the trial that managers repeatedly made reasonable scheduling accommodations for him, and that his reinstatements after multiple fireable offenses demonstrated the company’s conciliatory approach.
Defense attorney Daniel Kessler of Burkhalter Kessler Clement & George LLP told CVN jurors he spoke with after the trial attributed their verdict largely to Saifudeen’s own testimony.
“Jurors commented on plaintiff’s own testimony as being inconsistent and lacking any real detail as a reason for their unanimous verdict in Ralphs’s favor,” he explained. “The plaintiff admitted in deposition that he could not articulate a single reason why he believed any of the three accused store managers acted in any discriminatory manner. We played that video testimony for the jury during opening statement, and again during cross-examination. That clearly impacted the jury.”
Attorneys for Saifudeen did not respond to requests for comment.
Kessler declined to provide specifics about settlement or demand offers from either side, but he did state the defense did not see this "as a high value case.”
“We tried to resolve it at early mediation years ago, but the parties were never in the same universe.”
Ralphs was also represented by Michael Obereck and Monique Bartley of the same firm.
Saifudeen was represented by Shegerian & Associates.
The trial took place before Judge J. Stephen Czuleger.
The case is captioned Mohamed Saifudeen v. Ralphs Grocery Company, case number BC719286 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
E-mail David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
