CASE UPDATE: Discrimination

You may remember the social media frenzy surrounding the casting in a production of the Colour Purple and now in Seyi Omooba v Michael Garrett Associates Limited (T/A Global Artists) and another [2026] EWCA Civ 253, the Court of Appeal has dismissed Miss Omooba's application to reopen an earlier refusal of permission to appeal, upholding all previous findings against her at every stage of the litigation.

Miss Omooba, a Christian actress, was cast in the leading role of Celie in the Curve Theatre's production of The Colour Purple in December 2018. Celie is an iconic role involving a lesbian relationship. After the cast was publicly announced in March 2019, a Facebook post Miss Omooba had written in 2014 was circulated on social media. In it she stated that she did not believe homosexuality was right and could not reconcile it with biblical teaching. A severe social media backlash followed. The Theatre terminated her employment contract on 21 March 2019; her agency, Global Artists, followed suit three days later. During the subsequent tribunal proceedings, Miss Omooba accepted that, having read the script, she would not have played the part regardless of her dismissal.

She brought claims of direct religion or belief discrimination and harassment under the Equality Act 2010, together with a breach of contract claim against the Theatre. The Employment Tribunal, following a six-day hearing, rejected every claim. It found that although Miss Omooba's beliefs were protected under the Act, neither the Theatre nor the agency terminated their contracts because of those beliefs. The reason for the Theatre's decision was the commercial and artistic damage caused by the social media storm, which threatened the production's viability. The agency acted because continuing to represent her posed an unacceptable commercial risk to its business.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld those findings in full in 2024. Lord Justice Bean then refused permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal. Miss Omooba subsequently applied to reopen that refusal under CPR 52.30, arguing that the Court of Appeal's later decision in Higgs v Farmor's School [2025] EWCA Civ 109 was so similar to her case that Lord Justice Bean must have fundamentally misunderstood the issues when refusing permission.

The Court of Appeal, in a judgment delivered by Lady Justice Falk (with whom the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Moylan agreed), rejected that argument. The threshold for reopening a refused permission application under CPR 52.30 is genuinely high: the court must be satisfied that the integrity of earlier proceedings has been critically undermined and that there is a powerful probability of significant injustice. None of that was established here. Crucially, Higgs was not comparable. That case turned on whether the manner in which a belief was expressed was objectionable, requiring a proportionality assessment. In Miss Omooba's case, the key issue was the "reason why" the contracts were terminated, and the tribunal found, as a matter of fact, that the reason was commercial pressure rather than belief. Those two cases involved different legal questions.

The Court also confirmed that an employer can take action to address a dysfunctional commercial situation caused by external reaction to an employee's views, without that action automatically amounting to discrimination. The social media storm led to the terminations. Miss Omooba's beliefs formed part of the background, but were not the operative reason for what happened. The harassment claims failed on the same basis: the Respondents had neither caused nor contributed to the social media hostility she experienced.

The costs order against Miss Omooba, and the Tribunal's order requiring her representatives to remove hearing documents from their website, were also upheld. According to the BBC, these amounted to over £300,000.