What You Need to Know

• New Jersey attorney Teresia Bost claims she was constructively discharged from her job as general counsel at healthcare startup 54gene.
• Bost claims the company wrongly accused her of misappropriating funds and obtaining unauthorized bonuses
• Working at 54gene subjected her to a hostile work environment, Bost said in her suit.

A New Jersey attorney, who was general counsel to a healthcare startup, claims in a lawsuit that she was falsely accused of misappropriating company funds.

Teresia Bost says in her suit that 54gene, the Washington, D.C., company where she worked, had a hostile work environment with “telephonic rampages” and “screeching temper tantrums” by Tobi Oke, a partner in a venture capital fund that bankrolled the operation.

The company seeks to promote development of drugs to treat disease in Africa, and Bost, who is Black, said in the suit that she was used as the company’s “minority marionette.”

Attorneys from Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani , representing 54gene and the five individual defendants, removed the case to U.S. District Court in Trenton, New Jersey on July 17. The firm’s Elizabeth Lorell and Maxine Nicholas did not respond to requests for comment.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi.

Alleged Pay Disparity

Bost says in the suit that when she was hired as general counsel in September 2021, her salary was $330,000.

But by the time she resigned under pressure in January of 2023, her salary had been...

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