McDonald’s Forced to Defend Against Entrepreneur Byron Allen’s $10B Racial Discrimination Lawsuit
McDonald’s Corp has been ordered by a U.S. judge to defend against media entrepreneur Byron Allen’s $10 billion lawsuit accusing the fast-food chain of “racial stereotyping” by not advertising with Black-owned media.
In a decision on Friday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin in Los Angeles said Allen could try to prove that McDonald’s violated federal and California civil rights laws by deeming his networks ineligible for the “vast majority” of its advertising dollars.
Allen accused McDonald’s of relegating his Entertainment Studios Networks Inc and Weather Group LLC, which owns the Weather Channel, to an “African American tier” with a separate ad agency and much smaller ad budget, depriving them of tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue.
