State Department Owes Language Instructor $500,000 for Job Bias

A former French language instructor with the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute was discriminated against and harassed because of his Ivorian descent and subjected to retaliation for participating in protected activity, a D.C. federal jury ruled.

It awarded Tiemoko Coulibaly $500,000 in compensatory damages on his claims under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act following a six-day trial.

Coulibaly was born in the Ivory Coast and began teaching at the FSI as a contractor in 1999 before being hired directly in 2011, according to his fourth amended complaint in the 2014 suit. The Arlington, Va.-based institute is the ...