A restaurant in and affluent California enclave has reportedly settle a federal suit with an African-American man who said the company referred to him with racial epithets on his credit card receipts.
According to the Orange County Weekly, lawyers representing Mark McHenry, a successful black businessman, agreed to terms with the restaurant's lawyers. In the suit, McHenry said that he had been a regular customer of the popular restaurant since moving to the town. When he went home after one visit, he said he looked at his receipts to find slurs in the place where his name should have been.
You can see photocopies of the receipts here. One of them reads "Mc Stinkynigger" and the other reads "McNigshit."
The case was supposed to go to a jury next month. The terms of the settlement were not made public.
After McHenry's lawyer's discovered other cases in which racial epithets had been used by Landmark employees, the restaurant's lawyers attempted to block efforts to check more Landmark receipts to determine whether there was a systematic use of racial epithets.
Last year, the restaurant's owner said that an employee was fired after the incident.
"It's not something we condone or foster in any way," Marovic said of the claims of racism. "I don't know how this could have happened. It really upsets me. We would have resolved this situation immediately" if he'd been aware of the allegations.