An Iranian-born research scientist who filed a federal discrimination lawsuit alleging she had been harassed by a University of Alabama at Birmingham co-worker for nine years because of her ethnicity has been awarded more than $3.8 million in damages.
Fariba Moeinpour, 62, said she was thrilled with the jury verdict, which was handed down Tuesday in the Northern District of Alabama, and ready to restart her life.
“Day and night, I was looking for a job, any job, but nobody would hire me because my name was tarnished,” Moeinpour told NBC News. “Now, my good name has been restored.”
UAB, according to the jury verdict, was ordered to pay Moeinpour $3 million in damages.
Mary Jo Cagle, a former UAB data analyst who was identified in the lawsuit as the person who harassed Moeinpour, was ordered to pay her $500,000 in compensatory damages and another $325,000 in punitive damages.
Moeinpour’s lawyer, Eric Artrip, said his client “put up with years of being called all sorts of terrible names.”
“This case is a reminder that people do not have to suffer racial discrimination in silence, and that the American justice system works for all of us,” Artrip said.
UAB spokeswoman Alicia Rohan said the university “does not tolerate harassment, retaliation or discrimination of any kind” but did not specify what legal steps it would take next.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict in this case involving former employees, and we are considering next steps,” Rohan said in an email.
Cagle did not respond to requests for comment.
Moeinpour is a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Iran in 1989 and settled in Birmingham. She said her ordeal began in February 2011 after she was transferred from another UAB lab to one headed by Clinton Grubbs.
In her 2021 lawsuit, Moeinpour said she had been moved to Grubbs’ lab after she found evidence of data falsification and manipulation and reported it to an agency of the federal Department of Health and Humans Services.
Cagle, according to the lawsuit, began harassing Moeinpour almost from the moment she started working for Grubbs at the UAB School of Medicine.
Moeinpour said Cagle taunted her repeatedly, telling her she had a “weird ass” name and told her to “go back to Iran.”
“Our country does not need your kind,” Cagle said, according to the lawsuit.
Moeinpour said in the lawsuit that the abuse escalated over the years and that Cagle once nearly ran her and her daughter over with a car and later pulled a gun on her “in the UAB parking deck while telling her that this is what ‘we’ do to a ‘sand n—–.’”
Over a period of nine years, Moeinpour said she repeatedly complained to UAB’s human resources department and to Grubbs, who was also Cagle’s supervisor. He is not a defendant in the lawsuit.
But Grubbs was reluctant to intervene and told Moeinpour that “Cagle was in the mafia” and that he was afraid of her, according to the lawsuit.
Finally, Moeinpour told Grubbs on Feb. 13, 2020, that she had gone over his head and called human resources.
“Dr. Grubbs grew increasingly agitated, said he would lose his job, that they would ask why he hadn’t reported her complaints, and that he would kill himself if that happened,” the lawsuit said.
Grubbs, the lawsuit alleged, called campus police to have Moeinpour arrested “to shut her up about Defendant Cagle’s actions.” And at one point, Grubbs “grabbed Ms. Moeinpour by the chin and knocked her down, cutting her face with his nails and causing her to bleed.”
“When Ms. Moeinpour fell to the floor, he fell on top of her and held her down,” the lawsuit said. “In an effort to get him off of her, Ms. Moeinpour slapped him.”
When campus police arrived, Moeinpour admitted that she had struck Grubbs “to try to make him stop attacking and groping her,” according to the lawsuit.
“I wound up spending 30 hours in jail,” Moeinpour said.
UAB subsequently fired her on Feb. 18, 2020 “for violating its policy against fighting and absenteeism, despite knowing that Ms. Moeinpour had said she was attacked by Grubbs and without interviewing her or asked her for evidence to substantiate her claims,” the lawsuit states.
Moeinpour repeated her account in the complaint she filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in August 2020 under her former married name, Fariba Moeinpour Lawsen. She is divorced.
The UAB police department’s Feb. 13, 2020, domestic violence report described Moeinpour as an “out of control” aggressor who slapped Grubbs during an argument.
Grubbs said in the report that the quarrel was sparked when Moeinpour “went over his head and contacted his supervisor without first contacting him.” Grubbs did not give a reason in the report for why he thought she did so.
Grubbs said he did not want to press charges and that they “had been in a relationship in the past year.”
But Moeinpour told NBC News in 2021 interview: “I never had a romantic relationship with Dr. Grubbs.”
Grubbs did not respond to an email from NBC News seeking comment about the verdict.
Moeinpour said her daughter, who is a lawyer, supported her while she waged her legal battle. “She put her life aside to help me,” she said.
“I intend to stay in Birmingham, this is my home,” she said. “I love America. But what they did to me was un-American. We are all human beings under God.”
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