Ex-Red Sox OF suing NY company
A 70-year-old former Red Sox outfielder is suing a New York-based consulting company he says fired him because of his age after subjecting him to more than a year of bullying and humiliation.
“I was still at the top of my game,” Joe Lahoud, who patrolled the Fenway outfield from 1968 until 1971, told the Herald. “I loved doing what I was doing and I was successful. And my competitive juices were there. I am not going to give up or have someone push me out of something I am still good at.”
Lahoud said he was one of the top-performing sales consultants for Document Technologies LLC when he was let go in early January. The termination, Lahoud said, came after he was repeatedly pressured to retire by his superiors and mocked because of his age.
A spokeswoman for DTI as well as an attorney representing the company both declined to comment on the lawsuit or the firing. According to court records, DTI will file a motion tomorrow to either have the case dismissed, or moved into arbitration.
According to the complaint, filed in federal court in New York earlier this year, one of Lahoud’s bosses drunkenly said, “boy, did you get fat and old,” in front of a client and repeatedly commented to clients and colleagues “can you believe how old he is” and “age is starting to get to him.”
The company offered him a severance package, a Rolex watch and a retirement party, Lahoud said, but he told them he was not ready to retire. DTI retaliated by denying him sales commissions in an effort to push him out, he said.
“It wasn’t easy to work there and be degraded and called different names in front of clients,” he said. “And I became less productive because there were so many roadblocks to me becoming productive.”
Lahoud, who lives in Connecticut, hired a lawyer last October and was fired less than three months later.
Although the suit doesn’t specify damages, Lahoud’s attorney, Michael Willemin, said “we expect it to be substantial given the egregious behavior Mr. Lahoud was forced to endure.”
Lahoud, who said he is now working for another company in New York, played 11 seasons in the majors and is best known for being the youngest Red Sox player in history to hit three home runs in a single game.
“I don’t want this to go away,” Lahoud said of his lawsuit. “I want people to know to not just give up and say ‘they are going to offer me peanuts, I’ll take it.’ They shouldn’t be able to displace workers because of discrimination of any kind.”