Suns Beat Ex-Employee’s Racial Bias, Security Lawsuit

The Suns have avoided a lawsuit from the team’s former director of safety, security, and risk management who accused the franchise of racial discrimination and claimed it has serious security deficiencies. 

The suit from Gene Traylor, filed last May, has been voluntarily dismissed with prejudice, meaning he cannot refile the same claims.

“As we have maintained from day one, Mr. Traylor’s claims were based on lies and entirely without merit,” Suns senior VP of communications Stacey Mitch said in an emailed statement to Front Office Sports. “There was no settlement and there will be no payment to Mr. Traylor. Instead, he has now abandoned these baseless claims, dismissing them and waiving any ability to re-assert them.” 

Traylor’s attorney, Sheree D. Wright of IBF Law Group, told FOS she is bound by a confidentiality agreement with Traylor and “cannot disclose the outcome of the case or the specific terms surrounding the stipulation.”

“What I can say is that both parties agreed to the stipulation because it was appropriate under the circumstances,” she said. “This resolution should not be interpreted as a reflection on the merits of Plaintiff’s claims, but rather as a procedural step both sides determined was proper.”

Traylor claimed the franchise ignored urgent security concerns that he said preceded multiple high-profile incidents, one involving the Suns’ CEO and another which saw former Phoenix Mercury player Britney Griner harassed at an airport (Mat Ishbia bought the Suns and Mercury from embattled ex-owner Robert Sarver for a then-record $4 billion in December 2022).

Traylor’s allegations were explosive. For example, he claimed that during multiple field tests undertaken by the Phoenix Police Department’s Homeland Defense, aimed at assessing the safety of public venues, plainclothes officers were able to enter the team’s arena with concealed weapons, including knives and handguns. According to Traylor, his insistence that these deficiencies needed to be addressed were “disregarded” as an attempt to question the authority of his higher ups, “rather than as good-faith efforts to protect the organization and its guests.”

The lawsuit claimed the team initiated a plan to get rid of him, and that ultimately he was demoted, not terminated. Traylor claimed his demotion “was not performance-based but rather a direct result of his identity as an educated, accomplished Black professional who is respected in his field—qualities that intimidated Defendant and their leadership.”

Other Lawsuits Against the Suns

Traylor’s suit has been dropped, but the Suns still face multiple other suits from former employees. In April, a Hispanic woman originally identified as Jane Doe sued the team for discrimination, retaliation, and a hostile workplace. That woman, eventually identified as Chelsea Montes, issued a statement in September after her name was revealed through the lawsuit, saying she “fought for equity behind closed doors, including in a recorded 2022 meeting with the CEO and senior executives where I called out inequities and the lack of Latino representation among staff.”

In that case, there’s a status conference set for May 22, according to the docket.

Before Montes, a 46-year-old video engineer alleged in March that the team pressured him to change his employment status to contractor and then pushed him into unsanitary working conditions. The first suit of the bunch, lodged last November, came from the Suns’ former head of diversity, equity and inclusion, who alleged that the workplace environment did not improve at all after Sarver sold the team to Ishbia. Both those cases remain ongoing.

The plaintiffs in the suits—including Traylor—are all represented by the same attorney, Sheree D. Wright of IBF Law Group. Wright previously told FOS that she had received outreach from other people as well, and that she anticipated additional lawsuits once their claims were properly vetted. “I’m not the one creating these lawsuits—the Suns’ own internal conduct has brought us here,” she said.

The Suns have maintained the suits are all frivolous, and have sought to undermine Wright’s credibility by pointing to times she has been disciplined by judges in Arizona for violations of the rules of professional conduct. Amid the suits, Wright and another attorney at her firm were sanctioned by an Arizona federal judge for using artificial intelligence that cited fake cases. Wright said in a statement then that her firm has taken “meaningful steps” to ensure that doesn’t happen again, including dismissing the staff member responsible.

Wright did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about the dismissal of Traylor’s suit.

In September, Ishbia was defiant in the face of questions about the lawsuits, saying during a press conference with reporters “we don’t settle. If we’re not doing anything wrong, I’m not paying someone.”