Televangelist George Bloomer was awarded $62.2 million by a federal jury, four years after suing Kevin Adell, the white owner of The Word Network, billed as the “largest African American religious network in the world,” for race discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. A federal jury in Detroit made the award Wednesday following a five-day trial before U.S. District Judge Susan DeClercq, The Detroit News reported.
Bloomer, 63, who founded the Bethel Family Worship Center, a multicultural ministry in Durham, North Carolina, hosted the television programs “Rejoice in the Word” and “The First Word” on the network from approximately 2011 to September 2019. He left the network in 2019 following an uproar over a controversial meme showing the pimping of black pastors. Black pastors protested and called for a boycott of the network.
In the petition calling for the boycott, Bloomer alleged that in September 2019, Adell texted a photoshopped image of himself dressed as a pimp surrounded by well-known black clergy he called “hoes” to various staff members, many of whom are black. Bloomer was included in the text. “When Bishop Bloomer stated: ‘This is not funny. This is not good.
That pimp talk and hoe talk has racist connotations for Black people.’ Adell texted Bishop Bloomer a second time and said that ‘it’s funny and he should get over it,’” the petition said. Bloomer then went to Adell and his assistant in person at The Word Network and told them: “Don’t ever tweet that. You should get rid of it. This is not funny.
Don’t play with this and don’t play with it with me.” Rather than apologizing, Adell allegedly photoshopped a picture of Bloomer in a white tuxedo into the image and added text underneath it that said: “The show last night was good, Tattoo (the dwarf from Fantasy