Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
A woman who worked on the hit US television series "Friends" has sued producers claiming that raunchy jokes traded by writers of the show amounted to "degrading" sexual harassment.
The case, being argued before California's Supreme Court, could affect the way that all Hollywood writers work, according to the producers of the show that ended its 10-year run two years ago.
The woman, writers' assistant Amaani Lyle, whose duties during her four-month stint at the show were primarily taking notes in script meetings, is still fighting her case seven years after she was fired.
"She is living in a degrading environment where women are just playthings for males who want to demean them and make fun of them," her attorney Scott Cummings told the court late Tuesday.
Producers say Lyle, who worked briefly for Warner Bros. Television Productions in 1999, was fired because she could not type fast enough and that dialogue developed during meetings was often missing as a result.
But in October 2000, Lyle sued Warner Bros. Television Productions and Adam Chase and Gregory Malins, executive producers and writers for "Friends," and Andrew Reich, a writer on the show, claiming sexual and racial harassment.
Lyle, who is black, claimed she was subjected to offensive and racially insensitive comments by the writers and producers.
But an attorney for Warner Bros, Adam Levin, told the court that writers must be able to speak freely when developing story lines as part of the creative process and warned that a victory by Lyle could hurt Hollywood.
"I think that the chill would be felt in the motion picture industry, in the news industry. I think it would be felt in the classrooms of universities," Levin said.
But Lyle's lawyers insisted that Hollywood writers should not be exempt from harassment laws.
The case was dismissed as frivolous in 2002 by a judge who awarded 400,000 dollars in attorneys fees against Lyle, but an appeals court reinstated the case in 2004, ruling that a "sexually coarse, vulgar and demeaning language" as part of the creative process is not a defence against a sex harassment claim.
ml/ksb
AFPEntertainment-US-television-Friends-justice
AFP 151921 GMT 02 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
