A judge has ordered New York broadcast station WPIX/Channel 11 to pay a former anchor over $2 million (over N2.7billion) after a courtroom battle.
Ojinika “Oji” Obiekwe worked for the Nexstar-operated company for 22 years and claimed the station fired her in 2023 because she spoke against alleged racial discrimination in the newsroom.
Born and raised in Enugu, she moved to the United States (US) at age 16 for college and studied Communications at Seton Hall University. Ojinika is the second of five children.
Obiekwe is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, global TV host, executive producer, and media strategist with nearly a quarter of a century in media.
After spending more than two decades inside one of America’s top newsrooms, she now leads global storytelling and strategy through the B.O.O.P. Group of Companies, with operations spanning Switzerland, the US, and Nigeria.
On Tuesday, a judge ruled in her favour after a weeklong trial and told the broadcasting company to pay her $1,137,000 for “compensatory damages for pain, suffering, or emotional distress” and $1,280,000 in punitive damages, according to court documents obtained by New York Post’s Page Six.
“I feel great! I’m grateful to God … I thank God for leading me to my lawyers because there’s no way I could’ve done this without them,” Obiekwe told Page Six.
“They believed in me. They believed my story. They knew I wasn’t lying. They just trusted me and then guided me and here we are: victory,” she added, followed by a cacophonous chuckle that screamed “Vindication!”
In a lawsuit she filed last year, Obiekwe alleged that after she was promoted to entertainment anchor in 2017, she found herself “having to do the work of two or even three employees, such as the work of a Segment Producer and even that of a Copy Editor.”
She likened her workload to “slavery” and “working on a plantation.”
“All that’s left for me to do at this point is pick cotton,” she would often say at work, according to the lawsuit, which also alleged that her white male counterparts at sister stations were doing less work with more resources.
She claimed that she was canned for complaining.
WPIX-TV vehemently denied her claims and fired back by accusing Obiekwe of using a “baseless lawsuit to undo the consequences of her own poor performance while working at WPIX.”
After their victory, Obiekwe’s attorney, Eric Abrams of the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, described “these kinds of cases” as “incredibly difficult.”
“The fact that we won, and the fact that we won big is a huge testament to who Oji is … The jury understood that her side of the story was the right side of the story, when PIX and Nexstar never did … No one deserves the vindication more than her,” Abrams said.
Obiekwe told Page Six she’s been overwhelmed by the support she’s been receiving — including from past WPIX colleagues.
She added that her win is not only for her, but “for every single person I’ve watched get wronged at PIX11.”
Former WPIX reporter Narmeen Choudhury, who says she quit the station after experiencing Islamophobia, shared in Obiekwe’s joy on social media. “This is a big win for [Obiekwe] but can’t help feel this is a collective win for so many others wronged by the mismanagement of that newsroom,” she wrote.
Obiekwe concluded, “You can’t fire people because they’re speaking up against discrimination. You can’t fire people because you don’t like them … I’m not there to be liked. I was there to do a job … I did my job.”
A representative for WPIX did not comment,the paper reported.
*PHOTO CAPTION: Emmy Award-winning journalist Obiekwe.
