Mr. Williams claimed that a State Farm claims adjuster told him she didn't believe his version of events. "There's a lot of fraud in your area," he claimed the adjuster told him. Mr. Williams, 58, is Black, as are the majority of the people in his neighborhood.
Mr. Williams was eventually paid a small portion of his claim by State Farm. His expenses had accumulated by that point. To pay his bills, he sold his properties.
Insurers have a strong incentive to pay as few customer claims as possible because their business is primarily comprised of money inflows from policy premiums and money outflows from claims payouts, which they refer to as "losses."
Mr. Williams, on the other hand, felt he was being treated unfairly because of his race. In 2019, he filed a discrimination lawsuit against State Farm. After analyzing claims data in Illinois, where State Farm is the largest insurer, his lawyer asked the judge in the case to certify the lawsuit as a class action. The judge ruled that analysis alone was insufficient to justify the formation of a class.
Then Carla Campbell-Jackson reached out.
Ms. Campbell-Jackson, a Black woman, had worked for State Farm in Illinois and Michigan for 28 years. She was fired in 2016 on the grounds that she had shared confidential information outside the company, which she denied. She claimed her firing was the culmination of a State Farm campaign to discredit her after she raised concerns that the insurer was using fraud as a pretext to deny insurance claims to Black customers.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agreed with Ms. Campbell-Jackson last year, ruling that State Farm discriminated against her. She has also filed a lawsuit against State Farm, accusing it of discrimination and retaliation. She agreed to testify on Mr. Williams' behalf after discovering his lawsuit. Mr. Williams is hoping that Ms. Campbell-testimony Jackson's will bolster his request for class certification by providing an insider's perspective on State Farm's treatment of Black customers.
"Recent allegations of discrimination do not reflect the State Farm culture," a company spokesman, Roszell Gadson, said in an email. "We use our business to do good and believe that racism has no place in society."
State Farm has been accused of racial discrimination by dozens of employees, customers, and agents of color. One pending lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleges that the company, the nation's largest property and casualty insurer, discriminated against seven agents. Another lawsuit, filed last month by a former Indian American employee, accuses coworkers of racial harassment.
Ms. Campbell-lawyer, Jackson's Robert McLaughlin, said he was representing more than 150 current and former State Farm employees of color who intend to file their own racial discrimination lawsuits against the company.
"State Farm appears to have treated many other policyholders the same way it treated Connectors and Darryl Williams," Mr. Williams' lawyer, Kenneth Anspach, wrote in a court filing on Monday. "Those policyholders deserve the same chance at relief."
Mr. Gadson, a State Farm spokesman, stated that the insurer denies the allegations and promises to "vigorously defend ourselves in court."
Ms. Campbell-Jackson was dubbed "Miss State Farm" by her coworkers for years due to her enthusiasm for her job, she explained in an interview. She also helped out at her local NAACP chapter in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
While working as a manager for State Farm's auto insurance claims in 2014, she was promoted to a position in the insurer's special investigations unit, known internally as the S.I.U., where claims were sent for closer examination after adjusters flagged them for fraud.
According to her testimony in Mr. Williams's case, Ms. Campbell-Jackson began hearing the phrase "fill the cups" soon after her arrival in the unit. Executives wanted employees from the special investigations unit to meet with claims adjusters and encourage them to flag more claims for further investigation, with the ultimate goal of denying as many claims as possible. They referred to the practice as "shaking hands and kissing babies," as if the employees of the unit were politicians courting potential voters.
Ms. Campbell-Jackson testified that one way to "fill the cups," as investigators were reminded at weekly meetings, was to focus on claims from "inner city" neighborhoods that were "high risk for fraud," making them easier to deny. A list of such neighborhoods was frequently disseminated. Ms. Campbell-Jackson once suggested that there might not be any fraud in a specific neighborhood on the list. Her boss allegedly responded, "Oh, yes, there is fraud in those areas."
Unit leaders announced in 2016 that the unit had denied nearly $136 million in claims the previous year, which they attributed to the program's success.
"'Fill the cups' was simply a way of denying payment to African American and other minority policyholders," Ms. Campbell-Jackson explained.
State Farm submitted sworn testimony in the case on Saturday from a former manager on the investigations unit's analytics team who claimed that the goal of the program, which he referred to as "filling the cup," was "not to increase the number of claims sent to S.I.U. by encouraging frontline claim representatives to submit claims." Rather, it was concerned with changing the way claims that had already been flagged as fraudulent were distributed within the unit.
In its filing, State Farm also stated that Ms. Campbell-Jackson had a "personal ax to grind" against the company.
According to her testimony, Ms. Campbell-Jackson expressed concern that she was recruited to the S.I.U. to lend legitimacy to its operations because she was a Black woman active in the NAACP. Ms. Campbell-Jackson stated that her managers forwarded calls from Black customers who were dissatisfied with their denied claims to her. She suspected that State Farm officials wanted to be able to tell customers that a Black employee had reviewed the work of the investigators and determined that they were correct to deny each claim.
According to her lawsuit, Ms. Campbell-Jackson informed State Farm officials about what she perceived to be discriminatory practices. The officials she contacted were initially interested in learning more, so she emailed them a list of cases she believed had been denied unfairly.
She and nearly a dozen other Black and Muslim employees working nearby also received copies of an anonymous letter sent through the US Postal Service, which called African Americans "uneducated" and Muslims "bottom of the barrel." According to her lawsuit, when Ms. Campbell-Jackson and the other employees reported their suspicions that the letters had come from within State Farm, managers dismissed their concerns.
Ms. Campbell-Jackson was fired by State Farm in May 2016, allegedly for sharing sensitive information outside the organization. Ms. Campbell-Jackson claimed she had simply sent State Farm executives an email containing customer claims information at their request. According to court documents, she was offered $175,000 in severance pay on the condition that she never speak about her experiences at State Farm.
Ms. Campbell-Jackson declined the offer. Later that month, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that State Farm was violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against her based on her race.
When an employee reports racial discrimination, the E.E.O.C. usually sends that employee a "right to sue" letter, essentially saying that it would be reasonable for the employee to file a claim in court. However, the E.E.O.C. sided with Ms. Campbell-Jackson last year, claiming that State Farm had discriminated against her and ten of her coworkers and recommending that the insurer pay her approximately $500,000 in damages and back pay. The two parties have not reached an agreement.
An E.E.O.C. official wrote in a letter to State Farm that it appeared Ms. Campbell-Jackson "was harassed due to her race and discharged in retaliation for complaining about harassment."
She filed a federal lawsuit against State Farm in Michigan in December, alleging discrimination, a hostile work environment, and retaliation. Benjamin Crump, a civil rights lawyer who has represented the families of two Black Americans killed by police, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, is on her legal team.
The same week Ms. Campbell-Jackson filed her lawsuit, two State Farm executives discussed it in a video sent to employees.
"Discrimination played no role in Campbell-termination," Jackson's Michael Trout, State Farm's chief human resources officer, said in the video, which The New York Times watched. State Farm's chief diversity officer, Victor Terry, stated in the video that the company was not aware of any other allegations.
There were additional complaints. In an unrelated lawsuit filed in 2020, Black State Farm agents claimed that they were pressured to work only in Black neighborhoods and then unfairly accused of technical violations in writing their policies. "A racially biased corporate culture replete with harmful stereotypes about its African American employees and customers," according to the lawsuit.
Mr. Williams, for his part, is awaiting the outcome of Ms. Campbell-testimony. Jackson's He was forced to pay his tenants' emergency hotel bills after a pipe on his property burst in January 2017, even though he was losing rent.
Mr. Williams filed claims totaling slightly more than $400,000, which State Farm initially denied. After months of vehement protests by Mr. Williams, State Farm began making a few piecemeal payments in October. According to court documents, they eventually amounted to around $56,000.
In court filings, the insurer claimed that Mr. Williams' report about his conversation with the adjuster was false. After he sued, State Farm attempted to recoup the money it had paid out, claiming that it did not believe his claims. Mr. Williams had been forced to sell his entire real estate portfolio by that point.
He has since returned to his previous job as a security guard.