Black doctor with $16K check was refused service at Chase Bank in Texas, lawsuit says
After years of medical school and residency, 34-year-old Malika Mitchell-Stewart finally had a check to show for her work — she’d been recently hired with a medical group in Texas and had just received her signing bonus.
Now she was headed to a JPMorgan Chase branch in Sugar Land, Texas, with a $16,000 check in her hand, ready to open up her first account with the bank.
However, Mitchell-Stewart would leave that bank with her check still in hand and the money out of reach after two bank employees refused to deposit her check, she says.
The Houston-area doctor has since filed a lawsuit against Chase and the two employees she says discriminated against her because she is Black.
McClatchy News has reached out to JPMorgan Chase for comment.
The company told ABC13 that it is “investigating” the incident and takes the “matter very seriously.”
“We have reached out to Dr. Mitchell-Stewart to better understand what happened and apologize for her experience,” the company told the news outlet.
The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 2, says that once Mitchell-Stewart showed her $16,000 signing bonus check to employees at the bank on Dec. 18, “she was treated like a criminal” because of the color of her skin.
According to the lawsuit, an employee began to ask “peculiar questions” about Mitchell-Stewart and tried to challenge if the check was real.
Then, the employee claimed she needed to get a “bank manager,” the lawsuit says. She brought an associate banker to Mitchell-Stewart, and the associate banker told her she “did not feel comfortable” allowing her to open the account and deposit the check because she believed she was trying to commit fraud.
According to the lawsuit, Mitchell-Stewart showed the bank employees identification and correspondence between her and her new company, along with her business card.
After still being denied at the bank, she went home, humiliated by the encounter, the lawsuit says.
“What Dr. Mitchell-Stewart was reminded of on this day was that she is a Black woman attempting to deposit $16,000 in a predominately white affluent suburb — Sugar Land, Texas,” the lawsuit alleges.
Nine days later, Mitchell-Stewart and her mother returned to the bank to file an official complaint. An official branch manager told her she should have been able to open her account when she initially went to the bank, the lawsuit says.
The manager apologized but said Chase had the right to refuse service to anyone “without justification,” according to the lawsuit.
Mitchell-Stewart is requesting a trial by jury and a compensation of at least $500,000 in damages.
Sugar Land is about 20 miles southwest of Houston.
This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 7:27 PM with the headline "Black doctor with $16K check was refused service at Chase Bank in Texas, lawsuit says."
