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Lizzie Pugh recently filed a lawsuit alleging that a Metro Detroit bank refused to deposit her casino jackpot check.
According to the Detroit Free Press, Lizzie Pugh filed a federal lawsuit accusing three white Fifth Third Bank employees, in Livonia, of refusing to cash and deposit her slot machine jackpot check. The Detroit Public School retiree said the three employees told her the check was fraudulent and refused to return it.
“I couldn’t believe they did that to me,” she said about the alleged incident. “I was devastated. I kept asking, ‘How do you know the check is not real?’… And they just insisted that it was fraudulent. I was just terrified.”
Pugh’s Aug. 29 lawsuit, filed via U.S. District Court in Detroit, indicates that she got the bank to return her check after multiple attempts. The suit also says she then deposited the check at a nearby Chase, where it cleared the following day without issue.
The now-deacon reportedly won her five-figure check during a church outing to the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort in Mt. Pleasant. She called the workers at Fifth Third Bank’s alleged refusal to deposit it an act of blatant racism.
Fifth Third Bank has not yet publicly responded to the lawsuit.
Banking while Black has proved to bring on unnecessary profiling for many years–even to the famous and wealthy. Back in January, for instance, award-winning Black Panther director Ryan Coogler was wrongly mistaken for a bank robber and arrested at Bank Of America in Atlanta.
Reports said the 35-year-old was handcuffed and briefly detained when he went to withdraw some money at the bank. Somehow, its employees assumed he was robbing the bank because he allegedly gave the teller his withdrawal slip with a small handwritten note on the back.