Wonder how the KTLA weather team would have handled this story: according to a civil suit filed in Vista, a woman claims she was fired on the spot after her Irvine employer saw an Air America progressive radio bumper sticker on her car.
The woman who was fired is the one bringing the suit, in case you're wondering.
Linda Laroca says that on Oct. 8, three weeks after she started at Advantage Sales and Marketing, her manager, Beverly Fath, pointed to the bumper sticker and remarked that it promoted “that Al Franken left-wing radical radio station.” Laroca alleges in the suit that Fath went on to say, “The country is on a high state of alert. For all I know, you could be al-Qaida.”
Laroca says Fath then fired her on the spot. But in subsequent interviews — mostly on Al Franken's left-wing radical radio station — Laroca went beyond initial news reports and said Fath called her when she did not show up to work the next day asking where she was. When Laroca brought up the firing, Fath said she was kidding. Laroca still maintains she did not think Fath had been joking. She's seeking lost wages and benefits and is claiming emotional distress and that her constitutional rights were violated.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.