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Former Phoenix Suns employee files discrimination complaint, seeks $60M settlement

Phoenix Suns
Tim Agne/KJZZ
The Phoenix Suns warm up before the start of Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the Milwaukee Bucks on July 6, 2021.

A former employee of the Phoenix Suns is claiming she was discriminated against and wrongfully terminated. She’s filed a complaint against the team and could ultimately sue.

Baxter Holmes, a senior writer with ESPN, has been following the Suns’ workplace for several years and has written about this latest turn. Holmes joined The Show to talk more about what's happening.

Conversation highlights

Who is the former employee who's filed this complaint?

BAXTER HOLMES: Yeah. So this is Andrea Trischan. She was the son's program manager of diversity, equity and inclusion. She joined the team — well, her hire date was in late September of 2022, and her hire date was just a little bit after. But this was a key time, because she joined right after then-owner Robert Sarver was suspended one year and fined $10 million following an NBA investigation into his conduct and into the team's workplace culture during his 18-year tenure, the team as majority owner.

And her job, it seems at least in part, was to try to clean some of that up.

HOLMES: Yeah. So with respect to the issue that, the subject of diversity, I would say that was one of the things that the NBA addressed in its investigation, in my reporting, my story from November of 2021, that was a subject that a lot of current and former employees brought up as well. And so, yes, there was an effort by the organization, an ongoing effort, to try to address that issue, and she was certainly part of it.

So what happened? It seems as though it didn't really go that well for her.

HOLMES: No, it didn't. She ended up being there only about 10 months. And if I would focus on a couple of key points, you know, so she joins the organization in November of 2022. She's been there about a couple of months, and she says that the team notified her that they were creating a diversity council that was gonna be comprised largely of executives for the team. Well, about one month later, I published a long investigative story detailing allegations of misconduct against several Suns executives, who were holdovers from the Sarver era, and the employees alleged had played key roles in driving and perpetuating aspects of their workplace culture.

And she looked at the story and the names that I mentioned and recognized that several were listed on the diversity council, one of her areas of focus. And she immediately saw that as being problematic and described wanting to investigate some of these claims.

And then she says that she was told by Kim Corbett, who is the head of HR for the Suns, and was her direct report that she needed to cease her investigation. And from then on, really, she described being, both retaliated against, discriminated against. She was later put on a performance-improvement plan and terminated by the organization in the summer of 2023.

Presumably those things are the basis for this lawsuit.

HOLMES: Yeah. Now, I should be clear here. She hasn't filed a formal lawsuit. And, I should add, potentially just yet. Now, at the point, what she has done is soon after she was terminated, she filed a formal civil rights complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Arizona Attorney General Office's Civil Rights Division. So she filed complaints with both of those. They're, you know, one's a federal entity, one's a state entity. They can decide kind of who picks it up. The civil rights division in the Arizona AG's Pffice picked it up. And she has been seeking — and at times, the Suns have been seeking — mediation ... kind of a settlement of the dispute. But what I can say is that her attorney and the document that I obtained, they made quite clear that they have a formal complaint — meaning a lawsuit — ready to file and that they anticipate doing so the deadline would be Nov. 13. Now, that would be one year to the day after she filed her formal complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Arizona Attorney General's Office, and I expect them to do so.

Is she seeking monetary damages mostly?

HOLMES: Yes. So $60 million is the amount that she is seeking from the Suns. That's a ... not-nothing figure for an employee. And I should note here, look, the Suns have denied her claims; they've denied her allegations; they've described them as a baseless charge and ... these claims are egregious and ridiculous demand for $60 million. You know, they believe ... the courts will find no American claims and quickly resolve this matter.

Just in terms of the timeline here, she was brought in around the time that former owner, Robert Sarver, announced he was going to sell the team. And there's been a lot of effort to try to clean things up there with Mat Ishbia is coming in. How does this fit into everything that the new ownership group is trying to do?

HOLMES: Yeah. Look, there's certainly been efforts by the new leadership team — and I should principally focus on Mat Ishbia here — to move the organization forward, to repair issues that remain from the Sarver era. One topic that I would mention — and she focused on it in her complaint, and it was something that I, in my initial December 2022 investigative report, focused on as well. And I should also add that the NBA's investigative report touched on this quite a bit. There are still executives there that are holdovers from the Robert Sarver era in key leadership positions across the organization, whom all employees alleged then and now — both in my reporting and the NBA's report — were key individuals who perpetuated aspects of a problematic workplace culture.

And so, while the organization has sought to move forward, as you rightly point out, there are still some people there that I would say employees have at times had very mixed feelings about. In terms of the ability to move forward. Like, how can we move forward if some of these folks are still helping run this place? I'm very interested to see where this leads.

And I say that because in my initial reporting, a lot of employees were asked, you know, like, "Oh you dealt with, you know, like you, you claim discrimination or retaliation or harassment or wrongful termination, you know, why didn't you ever file a lawsuit?" And so many people that I talked to over the last four years described that at different points during their tenure with the Suns ... they really thought about it. But they, they felt like they didn't have the financial resources to do. So maybe they hadn't really chronicled the evidence they would need, it would, would hold up in a court of law. And so there's not a long paper trail, quite honestly of employees kind of going after the Suns for things that they allege to have happened during their time there.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Mark Brodie is a co-host of The Show, KJZZ’s locally produced news magazine. Since starting at KJZZ in 2002, Brodie has been a host, reporter and producer, including several years covering the Arizona Legislature, based at the Capitol.
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