An ex-Cactus Jack employee who recently got into a racially charged altercation with one of his former employees at the restaurant's Fort Myers location is planning to file a discrimination lawsuit, and he's got video of the incident to back him.
According to Orlando Ortega, racism was the reason he quit his job as a waiter at the Marinatown Ln Cactus Jack in the first place. He recalls being met with a slur after walking over to one of the managers, on what would be his last day at work, and requesting that a dinner be voided at one unsatisfied customer's request. "I don't know what you're talking about, you retarded n***er,'" he claims to have been told.
Frustrated over the incident, Ortega walked off of the job - only to return later on in order to retrieve pay he was owed. What went down when Ortega arrived at the establishment is being disputed by both sides, but the recording that he took of a face-off he got into with Eileen Marcinkowski appears to back his allegations of a hostile work environment. In the video, Marcinkowski is unhinged and restrained in the arms of a bystander as a crowd of customers and workers look on. Not long into the clip that has gone viral, she can be heard spewing the N-word at him and then repeating it several more times.
In the days since the incident began to circulate on the internet, the restaurant's reviews on Yelp and other review platforms have taken a hit. But in spite of the blow to the site's reputation, she continues to clock in on account of the backing she has received from owner Jane Thursfield, who asserts that Ortega struck Marcinkowski before he began documenting what happened in the moments that followed. She also contends that while she finds the language thrown around reprehensible, regardless, Marcinkowski was off the clock when it all boiled over.
"I'm not saying that what she said was right at all because we don't condone that kind of language and racism," Thursfield told a local publication. "If it happened while they were at work, it would have been different, but they were both off work."
