Two former executives on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune have accused Sony Pictures of engaging in unlawful race, gender, and age discrimination and retaliation against them. Shelley Ballance Ellis, a Black woman, and her Latina colleague Monique Diaz have filed complaints with California’s Civil Rights Department and the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Sony’s management terminated them and other workers in retaliation for collectively opposing harmful discrimination and toxic working conditions on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. The pair have spent close to 50 years combined working on the shows.
Ballance Ellis was Executive Director, Licensing and Clearance at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Diaz also worked in the department. The pair were terminated in April. They are claiming they were terminated because they objected to racial discrimination in the workplace, the pay inequity Diaz experienced, the glass ceiling and other bias Ballance Ellis faced as an older Black woman, the airing of inappropriate footage of Southern plantations on Wheel of Fortune, racist comments and jokes made in Wheel of Fortune’s control room about Black women on the show, and the dismissal of workers’ concerns about racial bias in the Jeopardy! game questions.
The CRD and the federal NLRB will investigate the allegations over the coming months. The pair are represented by Hillary Benham Baker of Benham-Baker Legal and Peter Romer-Friedman and David Berman of Peter Romer-Frie.