Former Tampa Digital Director Sues Station For Sex Discrimination

By Stephanie Tsoflias Siegel 

The former digital director for WTSP, the CBS affiliate in Tampa, Florida, is suing the station and its parent company, Tegna, for sex discrimination.

Theresa Collington filed a complaint claiming she worked for the station for years, received promotions and failed to get compensated she believed she deserved.

Collington claims TEGNA discriminated against her in her compensation and when she was ultimately terminated her for violations of the company’s social media policy that male employees violated regularly with impunity.

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According to the complaint:

All other department heads at the Station and, based on Collington’s information and belief, all Directors of Digital at other stations owned by TEGNA are considered executive positions and are paid through TEGNA’s corporate payroll. All executive-level employees on TEGNA’s payroll receive higher salaries, larger bonuses, better retirement plans, and better insurance and other benefits than do similarly situated employees on the payrolls of P&S and TEGNA’s other subsidiaries. In addition, TEGNA employees receive stock bonuses awarding them stock in TEGNA, a publicly-traded company, which are not regularly issued to employees on the payrolls of P&S and TEGNA’s other subsidiaries.

It continues to say:

However, even after promoting her to Director of Digital, TEGNA left Collington on P&S’s payroll, denying her the higher monetary and non-monetary compensation paid to other Department Heads on the TEGNA corporate payroll.

Collington was ultimately fired after she put a post on Facebook that described a news story about a young boy who attacked and killed by an alligator as a possible hoax before learning the story to be true. FTVLive first reported the story.

The full complaint can be seen here.

We reached out to Tegna for comment and are waiting to hear back.

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