‘Central Park Karen’ Loses Lawsuit Against Former Employer Tied To Viral Video

The woman who earned the moniker “Central Park Karen” for her controversial run-in with a black birdwatcher ended up losing the lawsuit she filed against her former employer.

The woman, identified as Amy Cooper, had filed a lawsuit against her former employer, Franklin Templeton, in May 2021.

This was a year after when a video of her went viral that showed her yelling at a birdwatcher named Christian Cooper. In that clip, she could be heard calling the police and claiming an African-American man was threatening her as she was walking her dog at Central Park, the Post reported.

She argued that her call to the cops had nothing to do with the race of Christian Cooper. Amy Cooper claimed that the birdwatcher was overzealous and selected her as a target in a feud between bird and dog lovers.

Amy Cooper ended up getting charged by the Manhattan district attorney in July 2020 for falsely reporting an incident in the third degree. She underwent therapy sessions on the racial bias but still lost her job eventually.

Working as an insurance portfolio manager since 2015, she claimed that Franklin Templeton and chief executive, Jenny Johnson, perpetuated her image as a “privileged white female ‘Karen’” by making public statements about firing her after investigating the incident.

The statement made by the company on Cooper, something that garnered over 200,000 likes on Twitter, implied that the company had uncovered details about her alleged racism not evident from the video.

However, a Manhattan judge belied her claims.

"The incident received heightened media and public scrutiny, in particular, because it took place 'in the midst of a national reckoning about systemic racism,'" US District Judge Ronnie Abrams stated.

“The contents of the viral video, as well as the dialogue surrounding it both in the media and on social media, were already matters of public knowledge,” rendering the defendants’ statements “inactionable as pure opinion,” the judge added.