Revlon's chief executive, Lorenzo Delpani, has been accused of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks in an unfair dismissal lawsuit filed by the company's former chief scientific officer, Alan Meyers.
According to the legal filings, Mr Delpani allegedly said he could "smell a black person when he entered the room" after returning from a trip to South Africa, and on another occasion launched an "anti-American tirade" in which he claimed the US was becoming like Isis. Mr Meyers also alleges that Mr Delpani referred to Americans as "small minded" and "dirty", and expressed surprise at the lack of Jewish executives at Revlon because "Jews stick together", in an apparent reference to the company's controlling shareholder, Ronald Perelman, who is Jewish.
Mr Meyers claims that Mr Delpani treated him differently because he was Jewish and American, while most of the people on his team were Spanish and Italian. He was dismissed in December after raising safety concerns relating to Revlon's acquisition of the Spanish beauty care company Colomer Group, which he believed used raw materials that did not satisfy regulatory and safety requirements. It is also alleged that Mr Delpani attempted to remove an email from May 2014 in which Mr Meyers had raised quality concerns about a plant in North Carolina.
Revlon responded by saying the lawsuit was "completely meritless" and that Mr Meyers had "repeatedly demonstrated critical lapses in judgement and failed to perform at the high standard we demand of our employees". The company said it would "aggressively fight these baseless claims and this frivolous action".
However, the case was discontinued on 3 March 2015 with no finding of liability by the court. Mr Delpani was not a party to the case.
