The story I describe in my latest book “Minority Viewpoint – my experience, as a person of color, with the American Justice System” starts with a complaint I had made to a hotel manager about a negative experience I had with a hotel employee. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong since most hotels encourage comments and/or complaints so they can continue to improve their services. But in this specific case, repercussions turned out to be significant.
I had worked for several hotels during the early days of my career. I was trying to figure out if I would want to stay with the hospitality industry. All the hotels that I worked for had trained their employees to be extremely courteous to ALL guests and to encourage all guests to write in comments, especially if they had any negative experience. The hotel managers always told us that the feedback from guests is extremely helpful in improving services and in training employees. That is why during all my travels as an author and speaker, I have always tried to fill in a comment card irrespective of whether my experience was positive or somewhat negative.
That is exactly what I had done in this particular case. I even received a nice response back from the manager thanking me for my comments and confirming that I would have no issues at all during any of my future visits. I believed it because that is exactly what happens in most hotels, but in this case, things did not go well when I returned to that same hotel four months later for another visit.
The employee mentioned later that she was never disciplined for this complaint, she did not receive any verbal coaching either. In fact, she said, that apparently she and the manager felt that my complaint was ridiculous and laughed about my complaint. But then she reported to the police against me with some untrue and defamatory statements, which I had to fight against. This has been one of the most puzzling things about this interesting story of defamation and the ensuing lawsuit.