Man Fired Over Surprise Birthday Party Awarded $450K From Former Employer

A man in Kentucky won $450,000 dollars from a company that he used to work for after he was fired over a surprise birthday party that he did not want.

The news, which was reported by WLKY-TV, has been going viral online as people weigh in on all sides of the debate.

In August of 2019, employee Kevin Berling reportedly told his office manager that he did not want the company to throw him a birthday party because he was concerned that “being the center of attention” would trigger his anxiety disorder and cause him to have a panic attack.

However, on August 7, the company decided to throw him a surprise party anyway. Berling found out about the party on the way to lunch and had a panic attack. He said he had to “leave the office suddenly and spend his lunch break in his car,” according to court documents.

Berling’s 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.”

Unfortunately, the case did not end there. Bucher claimed that Berling met with the office manager the following day to discuss the incident. Bucher said that, according to Berling, the office manager “started reading him the riot act and accused him of stealing other coworkers' joy.”

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

After that, Berling was asked to leave the building and the lawsuit says that he was fired a few days later. According to Bucher, the Gravity Diagnostic employees “believed he was enraged and possibly about to get violent.”

Berling then sued Gravity Diagnostics for disability discrimination and retaliation, saying that the company did not accommodate his anxiety disorder. He claimed that the surprise birthday party caused him “to suffer from a loss of income and benefits and emotional distress and mental anxiety.”

A court awarded Berling $450,000 dollars in damages, which included $300,000 dollars for emotional distress and $150,000 dollars for lost wages.

Bucher told Newsweek, “I will just say that I am very happy for my client. Few people will know how much courage it took for him to take this case all the way to trial.”

He continued, “More than the financial award, I believe that my client was so happy and relieved that the jury recognized that he was not some violent and menacing person and that it was not okay for Gravity Diagnostics to just assume that he was without any evidence to support those misconceptions.”

However, Gravity Diagnostics founder and COO Julie Brazil plans to challenge the court ruling.

Brazil said, “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.”

She added, “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. My employees were the victims in this case, not the plaintiff.”

However, Berling’s attorney disagrees. Bucher said that the company “made assumptions that he was dangerous based off of his disability and not off of any evidence that he was violent.”