Employee Wins $450K After Suing Company For Firing Him Right after Throwing Birthday Party Against His Wishes

A man in Kentucky recently won a court battle against his employer after he was fired following a birthday party they threw for him against his wishes, due to his anxiety. 

Kevin Berling worked for Gravity Diagnostics, and, according to him, he asked the office manager in August of 2019 not to throw a birthday party for him. “Being the center of attention causes him immense stress, Berling said, according to court documents,” KIRO 7 reported.

When his birthday came around on August 7, 2021, the office organized a lunchtime celebration, according to the lawsuit, as WLKY reported. Berling reportedly heard about the celebration as he was going into his break for lunch, which sparked a panic attack. 

His attorney, Tony Bucher, said, “The person who was responsible for the birthday parties who he talked to flat out forgot about his request. She didn’t do it to be mean. She said she would accommodate it and she just forgot.”

The situation caused him to “leave the office suddenly and spend his lunch break in his car.” According to Link NKY, Berling did some breathing strategies and then went back to the office and continued his work.

Bucher said Berling was brought into the conference room the next day to talk about the celebration. 

“According to my client, she started reading him the riot act and accused him of stealing other coworkers’ joy,” Bucher said, adding that he then began to have another panic attack episode. 

“At this point he starts employing other coping techniques that he’s worked on for years with his therapist,” Bucher said. “The way he described it is he started hugging himself and asked them to please stop.”

Bucher said the two workers in the conference room requested that Berling stop, and then proceeded to leave when he didn’t. “Once the panic attack had subsided, Bucher said, Berling walked out of the conference room and was asked to leave the building,” Link NKY noted. 

WLKY added that he was sent home for the following couple of days and was fired that weekend, being told that his firing was “because of the events of the previous week.”

He sued the company over disability discrimination and retaliation. 

Per the lawsuit, according to WLKY, he said because his employer didn’t make accommodations for his anxiety disorder, the birthday celebration and the following incidences caused him “to suffer from a loss of income and benefits and emotional distress and mental anxiety.”

The jury agreed with him, namely due to a Kentucky law that safeguards employees with a disability from “adverse employment actions.”

The jury awarded Berling $450,000 in damages, with $300,000 for the emotional turmoil, while “$120,000 was for back wages and benefits, and $30,000 was for front pay,” Link NKY reported.

According to Gravity Diagnostics workers’ accounts, “they believed he was enraged and possibly about to get violent,” attorney Bucher said, but Bucher added that Berling has never showed any violent actions and when someone is typically going through a panic attack, they can’t move due to fear. 

“Basically what the argument was is he was fired for having a panic attack,” Bucher said. “They made assumptions that he was dangerous based off of his disability and not off of any evidence that he was violent.”

The attorney noted that if Berling had moved in a violent way, the company would be allowed to terminate him as an employee, but he didn’t do so. 

“I think another compelling piece is my client’s therapist testified at trial and talked about how anytime he sees the name of the company it gives him another panic attack,” Bucher said.

Gravity Diagnostics COO and founder Julie Brazil said the company is bringing a challenge against the verdict due to “discovery of juror misconduct violating trial judge’s orders, and then an appeal if necessary.”

“My employees deescalated the situation to get the plaintiff out of the building as quickly as possible while removing his access to the building, alerting me and sending out security reminders to ensure he could not access the building, which is exactly what they were supposed to do,” Brazil said. 

 “As an employer who puts our employee safety first, we have a zero-tolerance policy and we stand by our decision to terminate the plaintiff for his violation of our workplace violence policy,” Brazil said. “My employees were the victims in this case, not the plaintiff.”

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