An HIV-positive woman who was kicked out of a suburban personal-care home two years ago will receive more than $50,000 in damages from the facility after a recent ruling by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.
The commission found Sept. 30 that Canal Side Care Manor LLC, in Northampton County, illegally discriminated against the complainant, represented by the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, because of her HIV status.
The complaint was dual-filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which AIDS Law Project executive director Ronda Goldfein said needs to approve the commission’s verdict before it takes effect. She said she expects this to happen.
In addition to the $50,000 compensation for “humiliation and embarrassment” paid to the complainant, identified only as G.D., the commission also ordered Canal Side to pay 6-percent interest per year from January 2008, when she was ejected from the facility, bringing the current total to about $58,000. Canal Side will also have to create HIV/AIDS-specific nondiscrimination policies and pay the state $5,000 in civil penalties.
Goldfein, a member of the complainant’s counsel, noted that the majority of housing-discrimination cases in which the PHRC has found in favor of the complainant in the past five years resulted in awards averaging between $10,000-$15,000.
“This shows that they really took a look at the pain and the harm that comes with discrimination,” Goldfein said. “Usually as lawyers, when we think of pain and harm it comes down to numbers: If someone gets fired, you look at what it cost them to be out of a job, quantifiable numbers. But in this case, we had compelling testimony from our client’s sister and from our client about the pain she experienced, and I think the commission heard that and saw that the pain of discrimination continues.”
The complaint said that facility owner Lakshmi Kademani ordered the woman to move out immediately after she became aware that G.D. was HIV-positive.
The PHRC opinion described that Kademani called G.D.’s doctor, asking if she should “use a drinking glass, eat off a plate, use utensils and whether [her] clothes [could] be picked up with bare hands without fear of getting HIV.” PHRC said Kademani was told that the staff and residents would be safe, as long as they practiced “universal precautions” like not coming into direct contact with bodily fluids, but Kademani still said G.D. had to leave the facility.
After being told to leave in January, G.D. spent about two months living at her sister’s house, but Goldfein said her sister’s family was ill-equipped for another adult, who had both physical and emotional health challenges. G.D. spent a few days in a temporary shelter in March and was transferred to a psychiatric facility, where she was not permitted to leave until May because she had no housing.
“When she was kicked out of the personal-care home, she was given no time to make other arrangements. The personal-care home just said, ‘OK, we’re done with you, goodbye.’ They didn’t recognize that this is a human being, not a pet,” Goldfein said. “Because she had no time to make a plan, she ended up in a completely inappropriate housing situation at this locked psychiatric facility.”
G.D. has since found housing at a personal-care home and Goldfein said she is doing better.
G.D.’s sister, identified only as Queen, commented on her behalf.
“We’re all human and sometimes humans need help,” she said. “You can’t turn people away just because of who they are. Kademani and everyone there need to be accountable for their actions.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].