A former Paramount executive has filed a lawsuit alleging age and racial discrimination, claiming the company’s diversity push led to his firing after 30 years.
Joseph Jerome, who is white, filed the lawsuit in California federal court on Oct. 31, 2025, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In the suit, Jerome, who worked at Paramount from 1994 to 2024, alleges he was one of three CBS Media Ventures (CMV) attorneys terminated and replaced by younger employees from minority groups.
At the beginning of 2024, CMV reportedly had an approximately even split of white and minority attorneys, the lawsuit states. However, all those laid off from Jerome’s division were reportedly white and over 50 years old.
The complaint states that a 25-year-old Black law school graduate and former CMV intern assumed Jerome’s position as the senior vice president of business and legal affairs and production counsel for Entertainment Tonight, while younger Asian attorneys whose prior roles were eliminated during corporate restructuring replaced his colleagues.
Jerome’s lawsuit also references a November 2023 meeting led by then-CBS News president Wendy McMahon. She reportedly expressed concern about the older demographics of shows in her division and urged staff to attract younger viewers by hiring younger employees, per the lawsuit.
Jerome further alleges that he was later criticized for “thinking old” during a discussion about a potential deal after pointing out a misused legal term.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the lawsuit follows an April settlement between CBS Studios and a “SEAL Team” script coordinator who accused parent company Paramount of carrying illegal diversity quotas that discriminated against straight white men.
Paramount did not immediately reply to a comment request, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Paramount Dismantled DEI Initiatives
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, Paramount is among several companies that rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders. These orders mandated the dismantling of “illegal DEI” initiatives in the name of protecting “civil rights and merit-based opportunity” across the federal government, including in hiring, promotions, and performance reviews.
As part of the changes, Paramount removed race, ethnicity, sex, and gender from its numerical goals and eliminated requirements to collect demographic data from U.S.-based job applications, except where legally required. The company also dropped DEI as a qualitative metric from its Short-Term Incentive Plan (STIP), which had allocated 5% of funding toward representation goals.
“To be the best storytellers and to continue to drive success, we must have a highly talented, dedicated, and creative workforce that reflects the perspectives and experiences of our many different audiences,” Paramount said in a news release.
“Values like inclusivity and collaboration are a part of the Paramount culture and will continue to be,” the release continued.
Thousands Laid Off
Paramount also recently merged with Skydance Media following Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval, with the deal officially closing in August, AFROTECH™ noted. However, Skydance founder and CEO David Ellison reaffirmed that DEI initiatives would remain discontinued.
In his first major move since taking over the merged company, Ellison oversaw a new round of layoffs at Paramount, affecting employees across CBS Entertainment, MTV, BET, and other divisions as part of a company-wide restructuring.
The first phase of cuts, which began on Oct. 29, will affect about 1,000 employees, and another 1,000 to 2,000 are expected to be laid off in the coming months.
Ellison said the layoffs aim to address “redundancies that have emerged across the organization” and eliminate roles that no longer fit the company’s “evolving priorities” and new growth-focused structure, per AFROTECH™.
Former Producer Claims Racial Discrimination
Trey Sherman, a Black associate producer for the canceled CBS Evening News+, shared on TikTok that every laid-off producer on his team was a person of color, while those who transitioned into new roles were white. Sherman said he personally asked each white team member if they had been laid off, and all told him they had not.
@treymous
“Every person who gets to stay and will be relocated within the company is a white person,” Sherman explained.
“Now, in my meeting with the executive who told me I was getting laid off, I specifically asked him if it was a consideration for us to be relocated somewhere else within the company. And he said that ‘We advocated to keep the show. We advocated to try to get you relocated somewhere. And we couldn’t,’” Sherman continued.
Sherman said the executive — who had authority over which team members stayed with the company — told him it was a coincidence that only white employees kept their jobs, explaining that his decisions stemmed from prior working relationships.
“Mind you, not only is it not based on merit, it is, in its result, racist. I don’t care if you decided to keep people who had purple-colored hair. You deciding to keep people who you had ‘worked with before,’ which I don’t even know if that’s true, if the outcome of that decision is racist, the action was racist. That sh-t is f-cked,” he concluded in the TikTok video.
