RG Lawsuit Settles

“To me, The Register-Guard was like a hero of mine,” says Serena Markstrom, former RG entertainment writer and reporter. “When money was low, my mom would cancel cable before she canceled The Register-Guard. We, I, grew up with The Register-Guard.”

Markstrom even worked delivering the newspaper while she was in middle school. So she says it came as a shock that the paper she later spent 12 years working for as a journalist fired her for checking her work email while on pregnancy disability leave in March 2014.

“It really damaged my self-esteem as a professional,” she says.”Have I just been incompetent this whole time? Nobody told me. Have I just been roaming free being horrible?”

Almost a decade after Markstrom was terminated, the case was settled with a legal precedent as much at stake as the issue of whether Markstrom’s firing was legal.

Markstrom says she was accessing her email while on disability leave to send herself some of the positive notes readers had sent her over the years. She also mailed some evidence to then-Eugene Newspaper Guild union co-president Randi Bjornstad who needed to draft up a counter-offer to the separation offer then-RG General Counsel and Human Resources Director Wendy Baker offered to her while on leave.

Markstrom then deleted all the emails from her sent folder.

According to the court documents, the RG decided it wanted Markstrom to “end her employment” and Baker, a member of the family who owned the paper, had offered her a voluntary layoff, which included an agreement not to sue the RG.

Baker did not respond to emailed requests from Eugene Weekly for comment.

“Serena’s life and career were unfairly and unnecessarily upended and forever affected by those in charge at The Register-Guard,” Bjornstad says in an emailed statement.

Markstrom says she came to realize after her sudden termination that the higher-ups at the paper had “been building evidence” to make her firing legitimate and legal.

In 2018, GateHouse Media (now merged with Gannett) purchased the RG from the Baker family for an undisclosed amount. The Baker family kept all previous litigation from before the acquisition.

Markstrom says the case started when she became pregnant with her first child. In December 2013,  Markstrom was placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP), which threatened termination on Feb. 14, 2014, unless the issues described in the plan were fixed.

The problems began after the RG moved Markstrom from her “specialty” entertainment and arts beat to what she calls a “Frankenstein hybrid beat” that covered Springfield, the coast and rural news during a period of restructuring and layoffs at the paper in December 2012.

She says her last couple of months at the paper felt miserable due to pregnancy-based discrimination, harassment, retaliation and a hostile work environment. Markstrom says that the stress of the PIP threatened the health of her pregnancy and could even have led to preterm labor or a stillbirth. Her doctor put her on the pregnancy disability leave.

My doctor “told me it could literally kill the baby,” she says. “I remember sitting in my car, just bawling my eyes out.” She adds, “My whole world started crashing down around me.”

Read more on Eugene Weekly’s website here.