A Muslim woman said she was discriminated against before an N.B.A. game in Denver when she was told that she had to remove her hijab.
The woman, Gazella Bensreiti, 36, a receptionist from Westminster, Colo., said in an interview on Thursday that she was headed to pick up her ticket at will call at the Pepsi Center for a Denver Nuggets game on Nov. 5 to watch her 8-year-old daughter perform the national anthem with her school’s choir.
A female employee “put her hand to my face and told me that I would have to ‘take that thing off’ of my head,” Ms. Bensreiti wrote in a Facebook post earlier this month. “I have never felt so embarrassed and broken before.”
“I hope that no one is ever treated the way I was treated, especially in front of my daughter,’’ Ms. Bensreiti, who has two other daughters, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which owns the venue and the Nuggets, did not immediately respond to several requests for comment on Thursday, but told The Denver Post in a statement that the episode was a misunderstanding.
The spokeswoman, Becca Villanueva, said that a security agent “didn’t recognize that Ms. Bensreiti was wearing a hijab” and that Ms. Bensreiti was allowed to enter the arena after a supervisor quickly intervened.
Kroenke uses Argus Event Staffing, a private company, to manage security checkpoints for admission on game days, Ms. Villanueva told The Post.
“While the matter is still under review, we are taking steps to modify our screening process and provide additional education for our staff,” the statement said. “We have reached out to Ms. Bensreiti and look forward to engaging in honest discourse that leads to greater awareness and an opportunity to further celebrate the diversity that makes Denver such a special place.”
A spokesman for the Nuggets referred requests for comment to Kroenke.
Dave Brower, the president and chief executive of Argus Event Staffing, defended the security employee in an email Thursday.
“Our employee is a 71-year-old African-American woman who has worked for Argus for 14 years and until this incident she had not been accused of discrimination or profiling,” Mr. Brower said. “The patron repeatedly pointed to our employee and another Argus colleague while calling them racists. Argus stands behind our employee.”
The company also released video footage from the security checkpoint for the will call entrance of the Pepsi Center that showed Ms. Bensreiti passing through the metal detectors on two separate occasions.
The first time, the female security employee could be seen motioning with her hands to her head for Ms. Bensreiti to remove her hijab. The video then showed Ms. Bensreiti gesturing with her hands as the security employee shook her head from side to side and pointed emphatically.
There was no sound in the video, in which another employee could be seen stepping in and waving Ms. Bensreiti through the metal detectors after a little over a minute, while the female employee had gone to a nearby office.
The second time Ms. Bensreiti approached the security checkpoint, the video showed her being directed to remove something from her coat and to go through the metal detector again.
A lawyer for Ms. Bensreiti, Gadeir Abbas, said in an interview Thursday that the Nuggets “have a legal obligation to provide equal accommodations to all people regardless of their faith,” and that the team “did not meet that obligation here. The issue is simple, they just really need to make sure that this never happens again.”
Mr. Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, called for arena officials to investigate the episode and address how security personnel approach the religious attire of patrons.
The Pepsi Center’s venue guide online does not appear to specify clothing restrictions. The guide says that all people entering the venue must pass through a metal detector, but that they can request “alternative accommodations for screening.”
When the employee told Ms. Bensreiti to remove her hijab on Nov. 5, Ms. Bensreiti wrote in the Facebook post, “I told her that I would not take it off due to religious reasons.”
Ms. Bensreiti wrote that the employee responded by saying, “I don’t care, you can’t come in with it on.” Ms. Bensreiti asked the employee if she would be willing to take her aside so Ms. Bensreiti could remove it and “show her my entire head in private,” according to the post.
The employee refused, Ms. Bensreiti wrote. Ms. Bensreiti noted in the Facebook post that there were several “white men standing ahead of me with baseball caps on.”
Her 8-year-old daughter became upset and concerned that her mother might not be able to see her sing, Ms. Bensreiti wrote.
The employee then went into an office and returned “and waved me to go ahead through, without making eye contact or even acknowledging me as a human being, but ushered me like an animal,” Ms. Bensreiti wrote.
She was able to see her daughter perform with classmates, Ms. Bensreiti said on Thursday, but they left before the Nuggets game. The girl and her classmates had worn matching blue and yellow “Sing for Rocky” T-shirts that feature the Nuggets’ mascot, Rocky the mountain lion, according to a photo Mr. Abbas provided to The New York Times.
“This was a distressing incident that Gazella and her daughter will remember forever,” Mr. Abbas said on Thursday. “Every time they go to a security screening, going forward, they are going to have this in the back of their heads.”
In September, the Toronto Raptors introduced a new line of team-branded hijabs in an effort to be more inclusive to fans of all cultures.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
