Lawsuit Against Alabama Megachurch Pastor Dropped

A Mississippi U.S. District Court judge has dropped a federal civil lawsuit against an Alabama megachurch pastor and several others that alleged that they failed to protect a church intern from sexual harassment.

The suit named Dino Rizzo, an associate pastor at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama and co-founder of evangelical church-planting organization the Association of Related Churches (ARC), as a co-defendant along with Jason Delgado, the former lead pastor of Vibrant Church in Columbus, Mississippi, whom plaintiff Laura Ashley Eagan said had sexually harassed her when she was an unpaid intern at the church. 

Vibrant is an ARC member, and Rizzo was named in the suit as a responsible party because he acted as an overseer” of the church, although when the suit was filed, ARC issued a statement saying it has “no legal, governmental or corporate oversight or control” over any of its member churches. 

Also named as co-defendants were the church itself as well as Ron Delgado and Miriam Delgado, Jason Delgado’s parents. Ron Delgado had been Eagan’s marriage counselor at Vibrant until he referred her to counseling with his son, and Miriam Delgado was the human resources manager at the church. 

Eagan’s suit claimed that the alleged harassment by Jason Delgado, which she said started after he began counseling her, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal to discriminate against a person in employment based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. 

Judge Neal Biggers dismissed the claim Sept. 20, stating in an opinion that Eagan did not meet the criteria of being an employee of Jason Delgado under Title VII because she did not receive compensation for her work as an intern. Judge Biggers also said Jason Delgado failed to meet the criteria of an employer under the law, which requires an employer to have 15 or more employees for at least 20 weeks a year.

The lawsuit had alleged that Jason Delgado sent Eagan sexually explicit messages and propositioned her when she was part of an internship program at the church in 2020. 

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The suit claimed intentional infliction of negligence, emotional distress, fraud, and negligent hiring, training and supervision, and alleged that the defendants, including Rizzo, knew about Jason Delgado’s actions but took no steps to stop him or protect her. The suit said that Ron Delgado had even asked Eagan and other alleged victims not to “ruin” his son by reporting him.

Jason Delgado resigned his position as lead pastor of Vibrant in April 2021, apologizing in a letter to church members for unspecified “inappropriate behavior.” 

Judge Biggers said that Eagan was made aware that she could not sue for workplace harassment under Title VII unless she was classified as an employee, but did not dispute her status as an unpaid intern, which “could be interpreted as an indication of her awareness that she cannot support a finding that she was a Title VII employee,” he said in the opinion.

“Her only responsive attempt to remedy this shortcoming is to vaguely argue that she should be entitled to discovery to ‘flesh out’ these and other matters. What the plaintiff proposes is no more than a fishing expedition into discovery without a reasonable basis that she is entitled to such an approach,” Biggers said. 

The court dismissed the Title VII claim “with prejudice,” which means that Eagan can’t refile the same claim again in the same court. But Judge Biggers wrote that some of her claims could be viable in state court and that she should “consider asserting those claims.”

Eagan had previously filed a workplace harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in April, and the EEOC had notified her that she had the right to proceed with a Title VII case.