(10 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York – 26 February 2025
1. EEOC Judge Karen Ortiz walking
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"My name is Karen Ortiz. I’m an administrative judge at the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That is the federal agency charged with rooting out employment discrimination in both the federal and public sector."
3. Various of Ortiz on computer
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"We got directives, meaning the judges and attorneys in our office from our supervisors, to hold back cases where LGBTQ folks were alleging discrimination, which we had never been asked to do before."
5. Various of Ortiz on computer
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"I was waiting to see if management would step up and say, at least hold off on doing this until we explore the legality of it. But no one said anything. I then received an email on a Sunday, another fork in the road email. I was actually traveling and that kind of pushed me over the edge. And I started thinking about what would I call an email that I send out within the agency."
7. Karen Ortiz reading her email UPSOUND: "A spoon is better than a fork. Good morning Andrea. Apparently, no one in leadership is willing to ring the alarm bells, so it falls upon one of us to do it. If you want to continue following the illegal and unethical orders of our president and the unelected leader of DOGE, that’s on you. If, upon reflection, you feel like now would be a good time to take a vacation and resign from your position, please reply all to this email and put I’d like to occupy Mars in the subject line. We will take this as notification that you are resigning your position as Acting Chair. P.S. Happy Black History Month. Sincerely, Karen M. Ortiz."
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Judge Karen Ortiz, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
"This isn’t a partisan issue for me. We take complaints from any federal employee that follow that files them, any employee that files them regardless of their political affiliation or what the basis of their claim is. So it’s not about Trump. It’s about what’s right."
9. Ortiz walking
STORYLINE:
To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats representative of federal waste.
But to her colleagues, she has become somewhat of a hero. Karen Ortiz, an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws, was aghast when her supervisor asked her to pause all cases involving transgender people.
After receiving one too many “Fork in the Road” emails from President Donald Trump’s administration leadership, Ortiz replied with her own missive: “A Spoon Is Better Than A Fork,” addressed to EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas and copying more than 1,000 coworkers.
The internet-applauded message represents a larger trend of pushback against the Trump administration amid an environment of chaos, and a fierce stand by an employee of the civil rights agency that last month moved to dismiss seven of its own transgender discrimination cases.
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