Senior managers at Globe Life division traded racist memes
Brian W. Fraser for Business Insider
Three senior managers at a Globe Life subsidiary were sharing a chuckle over a meme that had just hit their phones.
The text from Domenico Bertini, then a vice president at Globe's American Income Life division, contained an edited image of a Black man in a blue work shirt splayed face down, caught in a giant mousetrap. At the other end of the mousetrap was the bait: a giant bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
"O shit…lol!!!!" responded Chris Selejan, then an AIL vice president, one of the three leaders who received the text in August 2018 from Bertini. "Fuck.lol," wrote Rob Gray, another AIL vice president.
Two years earlier, James "Bo" E. Gentile, who as of 2023 was a senior vice president of recruiting for Globe, had dispatched another racist meme to two colleagues. It was an edited photo of a Black man surrounded by 14 Black children with the heading "This dude couldn't pull out of a driveway."
Globe Life, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has five wholly owned subsidiaries that sell life, accident, and supplemental health insurance to working-class families, often through labor unions and credit unions. The company has the naming rights for the Texas Rangers' ballpark and is the official life-insurance company for the Dallas Cowboys. Globe, American Income Life, and one of AIL's top sales agencies — the Arias Organization — have been the subjects of a series of investigations by Business Insider over the past year in which agents described a culture of rampant sexual harassment, sexual assault, violence, drug use, and widespread customer abuses. In March, BI reported that the Department of Justice had sent subpoenas to Globe and AIL seeking information about interactions between the Pennsylvania-based Arias Organization and its customers.
During an earnings call last month, Globe co-CEO Frank Svoboda said that management did not believe that it was "reasonably possible or probable this investigation will result in material liability to the company."
Following BI's investigations, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold all of its 6.35 million shares of the company. Then Globe's stock plunged by 53% on April 11 after an anonymous short-seller called Fuzzy Panda Research published a report with further allegations of customer fraud, drug use, violence, and sexual assault at the company. Fuzzy Panda said it sent "undercover agents" to apply for jobs, only to be briefed by AIL recruiters on how to cheat on insurance exams and lie to regulators. Another short-seller, Viceroy Research, released a report on April 30 that contained fresh allegations of customer fraud.
After the publication of the Fuzzy Panda report, which Globe described as "wildly misleading," Globe announced it would buy back stock "as soon as possible." The company's stock has recovered more than two-thirds of its lost value since then.
Now BI has uncovered evidence of racism that stretches from Globe's headquarters in McKinney, Texas, to several of its subsidiaries' far-flung agencies around the country.
BI has obtained screenshots of sexist, racist, and anti-transgender texts that a small group of senior AIL managers sent to one another's phones between 2014 and 2019. Among the active posters was Gentile, who later became a high-ranking executive at Globe. Scott Dehning, a former AIL vice president of field operations who was one of the men included in the text threads, shared screenshots of the texts with BI. He has sued AIL and Globe, alleging he was wrongfully discharged in 2023 in violation of Michigan whistleblower protections after he reported "violations and or suspected violations" to the state's insurance department.
AIL has countersued, saying Dehning sexually harassed and retaliated against a woman who worked at an AIL agency, which resulted in a company settlement of $150,000 last year. In court filings, Dehning denied AIL's allegations. Both cases are still pending.
Jennifer Haworth, a spokesperson for Globe Life and AIL, did not respond to detailed queries.
Dehning said he didn't speak up about the racist texts while he was working at AIL because men in the text chains outranked him. "If I'd brought it up, I would have been blackballed," he told BI. The fear of being ostracized also motivated him to occasionally add "an 'lol' or something like that," he said, but otherwise he didn't respond to his colleagues' bigoted memes. BI was able to review only the excerpts of the chat threads that Dehning provided.
John L. Littrell, an attorney representing Bertini, declined to comment on his behalf. Ann Marie Arcadi, an attorney representing Gray, did not respond to requests for comment; neither did Selejan. Efforts to reach Gentile through various AIL representatives were not successful.
A boss who used the N-word
Civil complaints and interviews with several current and former agents at Globe subsidiaries suggest the text messages were part of a broader company culture where managers tolerated overt racism and people of color did not feel welcome.
A Latina woman who has worked in an AIL office in West Virginia for over four years told BI that her colleagues regularly used the N-word. A Black man who quit his job as an AIL manager in New Jersey in August 2021, after five years with the company, filed a complaint in January alleging that his white boss, an agency co-owner named Eric Giglione, blasted rap music that used the N-word at weekly meetings, even in the wake of the man's protests. Giglione also referred to him as "my dawg," he told BI. An Argentina-born woman sued AIL in 2016, saying her managers and coworkers in Aurora, Colorado, told her "frequently" between 2013 and 2015 that she was "too fucking Mexican."
Atiya Bell, a Black woman who from 2018 to 2021 worked at an AIL affiliate then called the Giglione-Ackerman Agency in Edison, New Jersey, told BI she was home making calls to clients one morning in 2019 when a text from her white male boss, a regional general agent in the office, stopped her dead in her tracks. He'd sent her a meme that used a racial slur to suggest Black people were "looking harder for them Popeye's Chicken Sandwiches than a Job."
Brian W. Fraser for Business Insider
Popeyes had recently introduced a chicken sandwich to its menu, and Bell said her boss, Morgan Lobello, was constantly making comments to her about it. She says that she told Lobello she'd never been to a Popeyes but that he didn't let up. "He said, 'I thought y'all liked chicken,'" she said. "I could literally cry right now telling you this."
"I had to deal with N-word jokes on a regular basis," Bell said. The complaint she filed in New Jersey Superior Court in January said Lobello routinely referred to her as a bitch and an N-word and that the company "tolerated and perpetuated an atmosphere pervaded by sexual and racial harassment."
Her suit also claims that AIL's president, David Zophin, was often in the agency's offices "to provide direct leadership." He did not respond to emails requesting comment.
She told BI that Lobello frequently sent her racist memes he found online that contained the N-word. In June 2020, Bell alerted one of the agency's owners, Eric Giglione, to a racist message from Lobello, forwarding it to Giglione in a text message she shared with BI. Giglione responded to her that he'd spoken with Lobello, who was now "on thin ice," but her civil complaint said Giglione took no further corrective action. Court documents indicate Lobello still worked at the agency as recently as March.
Efforts to reach Lobello through the Giglione-Ackerman agency, now known as the GA Gerstein Organization, and through Andy Mercado, an attorney representing the owners, were not successful.
Bell, who now runs her own agency, said that the harassment took a toll, leaving her anxious, less trusting, and plagued by self-doubt.
Complaints were 'ignored and concealed'
Then there were the alarming racist texts exchanged among the AIL managers. Bertini, while vice president, texted an image to three colleagues that showed shirtless Black toddlers smiling and dancing beneath the words "Its Friday" followed by the N-word. The men's texts also took aim at other people of color. Gray, while he was AIL's vice president of sales, sent his colleagues a meme of a smiling brown-skinned man wearing an oversize straw hat. The text over the image reads "MEXICAN WORD OF THE DAY: CHICKEN WING. MY WIFE PLAYS THE LOTTERY SO CHICKEN WING SOME MONEY."
Another message from Bertini includes a photo of a naked woman with the message: "To my male friends who are tired of taking a BACK SEAT to gays, lesbians, homosexuals, trans genders, women soldiers, bra burners, female boy scouts, women libbers, tree huggers, eco-commie-environ-freaks and any other cock sucking fuck wit… TODAY IS HETEROSEXUAL MALE PRIDE DAY! …SO CELEBRATE IT!"
The note ends by saying if you received the message by mistake, "tough shit, run out and tell someone who gives a fuck."
Bell's civil complaint says her colleagues "openly traded in egregious racial epithets and stereotypes" and describes a troubling team rewards dinner in 2020. There, the complaint says, a white female manager quieted the room and asked Bell: "When you take off your hat, is your hair attached? I know y'all have different ways of wearing your hair."
Courtesy of Atiya Bell
One of Bell's Black colleagues at Giglione-Ackerman was a managing general agent named Raynaldo Lafontant, the manager who filed a complaint in January about Giglione, the co-owner, blasting explicit rap music at meetings. The complaint says the agency's other owner, David Ackerman, suggested Lafontant cut his dreadlocks because it might improve his sales. "I never came to the office without a blazer and slacks," Lafontant told BI. "I was presentable at all times so didn't understand what my hair had to do with it."
Mercado, the attorney representing both Ackerman and Giglione, did not respond to requests for comment.
Sarah Reay, the Latina woman who said her colleagues in AIL's office in Morgantown, West Virginia, regularly used the N-word, said her boss' secretary, who was paid to clean the office, once told Reay, "It's your job to take out the trash." The secretary emptied trash pails for the other agents, Reay said, but not for her. So Reay would take her own trash to the dumpster to be sure her work area looked professional.
Another time, Reay said, a colleague told her, "Go back to your country, Mexican."
In a charge she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last November, Reay said that she reported incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault to Debra Gamble, an executive at AIL, and that Gamble told Reay her complaints should be addressed at the agency level. Reay said in her charge, which BI obtained, that she did complain to agency leaders about sexual harassment and a hostile work environment in the office but that the complaints were "ignored and concealed." After she did so, the charge says, AIL demanded that she forfeit her sales leads.
In her EEOC charge, which remains pending, Reay said that she was a dues-paying member of the Office and Professional Employees International Union but that when she tried to file a grievance with the union in September, she learned she had no grievance benefits. Nicole Korkolis, an OPEIU spokesperson, did not respond to requests for comment.
Black agents sent to 'uninsurable' territory
Several people of color who worked as agents have filed complaints alleging they were assigned to sell insurance in unprofitable areas. Last May, Globe Life's Liberty National Division settled a racial-discrimination case brought by Donnaya Presberry, a Black woman who worked at an agency in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. In her complaint, filed in October 2022, Presberry said that white agents were assigned to profitable, mostly white areas while she and other agents of color were stuck with less profitable neighborhoods. In its response to Presberry's complaint, Liberty National denied that white agents got preferable assignments.
Presberry said in her complaint that she was fired after she stood up against racism in the office, a claim Liberty National denied in a court filing.
Abeni Mayfield, a Black woman who once worked at AIL's office in Columbia, Maryland, said she was sent to white areas, but not the ones that were most profitable. In the areas she was assigned, she told BI, "most of the people were uninsurable" because of poor health, hard drug use, and poverty.
Mayfield said that when she arrived to pitch one prospect in Cumberland, Maryland, the woman who answered the door told her to sit on the floor. "She said, 'I'm sorry, you seem OK, and you are really pretty for a colored girl, but I just don't want you sitting on my sofa,'" Mayfield recalled.
In a charge she filed with the EEOC in May 2022, obtained by BI, Mayfield said she reported the demeaning treatment but was told by her "upline" that she could make more sales if she had "blonde hair and blue eyes." Amy Williamson, Mayfield's attorney, said an EEOC investigation into her complaint is ongoing.
Rosem Morton for Business Insider
Silvana Pajor Flores, the woman who said her colleagues told her she was "too fucking Mexican," said in an interview that her regional general agent in Aurora, Colorado, discouraged her when she sought to pitch customers in Kansas. He told her she'd be considered a "wetback" in the state, she said. Her suit against AIL says that she complained to coworkers and supervisors about the offensive comments, jokes, and slurs related to her ancestry but that the "Defendants failed to take any corrective or preventative action."
People working at Globe subsidiaries occasionally made racist remarks about customers, too. A white former regional general agent at the office in Edison told BI that he heard multiple colleagues claim that "Black people don't pay their bills"; Bell made the same allegation in her civil complaint. The former regional general agent said another manager in the office once told him, "If you work in the hood, the policyholder will stay for one month."
Bell's suit says demeaning comments about "the hood" were common at the agency.
Lafontant said in his lawsuit, filed in New Jersey Superior Court in January, that Zophin, AIL's president, gave a speech at AIL's headquarters in Waco, Texas, in 2018 in which he told the audience that he got rich selling life insurance in the "hood." Leaders "openly bragged about exploiting low-income Black communities," Lafontant said in his complaint, which describes racial harassment at the agency as "open and notorious." His complaint says leaders "made clear" that reporting it was futile because even Giglione, the agency's co-owner, made racist remarks.
Few anti-discrimination protections
AIL agents who file lawsuits that allege racism can wind up facing a powerful legal defense: Members of AIL's massive sales force are considered contractors, not employees. As BI has previously reported, the arrangement has often allowed the company to sidestep laws designed to protect employees from discrimination and sexual harassment.
When Pajor Flores sued AIL over race and gender discrimination she says she experienced in the company's offices in Colorado, AIL denied that it had discriminated against her "in any way." AIL also argued that because Pajor Flores was a 1099 contract worker, the company had no obligation to address her discrimination claims at all.
In a 2016 court document, the company made its position clear: "AIL denies that it employed plaintiff, knew or should have known about any alleged harassment, or had a duty to take corrective or preventative action."
Her case was thrown out of court because the judge said federal laws that protect employees from discrimination did not apply to the contractors who worked as agents at AIL.
Managers and agents who spoke with BI may not have been familiar with AIL's legal position, but they did feel its impact. Operating in an environment where management believes it has no legal obligation to correct or prevent discrimination can crush a worker. Lafontant said that over five stressful years at AIL, from 2016 to 2021, he gained 80 pounds, developed diabetes, had bouts with kidney stones, and began drinking heavily.
"I felt humiliated as a Black man being there," he said.
Brian W. Fraser for Business Insider
In a press release on April 11 responding to the Fuzzy Panda report, Globe Life expressed confidence in its ethical standards and its accountability systems.
"Globe Life strives to act in accordance with the highest level of ethics and integrity at all levels of the organization and to comply with all government regulations," the company said. "American Income Life (AIL) has processes in place to review, investigate and address all allegations brought to the Company's attention concerning unethical business practices, sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct and we do not tolerate such behavior."
If you work at Globe Life or AIL and have information to share about the company, please contact Susan Antilla at susan.antilla1@gmail.com.