SEAL Team Discrimination Lawsuit: CBS Loses Motion to Dismiss
CBS’s bid to dismiss a discrimination lawsuit filed by a SEAL Team script coordinator has been dismissed.
In May, CBS Studios filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Brian Beneker, who alleged that during his years of bidding to be promoted to writer for SEAL Team, he was discriminated against because he was “a white, heterosexual male.” But the motion was denied in a court order issued Wednesday, with U.S. District Judge John F. Walter ruling that CBS’s arguments would be “more appropriately addressed” through a legal process known as summary judgment; therefore, the case will proceed.
CBS initially filed the motion on the grounds that CBS “has a constitutional right under the First Amendment to select writers whose work shapes CBS’s artistic practice.”
Beneker has been a script coordinator for SEAL Team since March 2017 (except for a brief stint in Season 2). His lawsuit, filed in February, alleges that he was repeatedly denied the writer position despite CBS “hiring and promoting numerous others who lacked writing experience and track records but were in a preferred hiring group; that is, they were not white, LGBTQ, or female.”
Beneker alleges that since June 2019, when he first sought a job as a writer, SEAL Team has hired six writers instead of him — specifically, a “black male” and “black female” (both hired in Season 3), a “white female assistant writer” (hired in Season 5), a “black female assistant writer” (hired in Season 6), a “white female assistant writer,” a “lesbian” (also hired in Season 6), and a “white female assistant writer” (hired in Season 7).
Beneker’s lawsuit notes that CBS in July 2020 set a goal of having at least 40% BIPOC representation in its writers room, starting in 2021-2022.
“The racial and gender ‘balance’ of the SEAL Team writers’ room … created a situation where heterosexual white men required ‘additional qualifications’ (including military experience or previous writing credits) to be hired as writers when compared to their non-white, LGBTQ, or female counterparts who did not require such ‘additional qualifications,’” Beneker’s lawsuit reads.
CBS’s motion to dismiss argues that under the First Amendment, “an entity engaged in expressive communication may select individuals whose presence or absence would affect the entity’s ability to convey its own preferred message,” and that “restricting CBS’s ability to select writers of its choosing—as Beneker seeks to do here—unconstitutionally impairs CBS’s ability to shape its message.”
“Beneker’s disagreement with CBS’s alleged stance on diversity in the writers’ room is irrelevant to this analysis,” the motion reads. “The speaker autonomy rule as applied in [precedent] means that CBS, not Beneker (or the government), has sole discretion to decide what artistic content to produce and how to produce it. This rule also means that CBS, not Beneker (or the government), has sole discretion to decide what messages it wants to convey in its artistic content and what connections might advance or undermine those efforts.” CBS’s motion also argues that two of the six SEAL Team hiring decisions Beneker cites fall outside the statute of limitations, while three others cannot be recognized because the writers hired are of the same race (white) as Beneker.
