By Lillian Dickerson, Inman

A lawsuit coursing through New York State Supreme Court alleges that Jarret Willis, a Black real estate agent who previously worked at well-known luxury firm Bespoke Real Estate, was routinely called "Jafar" — the name of the primary villain (who has brown skin) in the 1992 Disney animated film "Aladdin" — by employees and leadership while employed at the firm.

About one month after starting his employment with Bespoke in 2021, Willis was promoted to vice president of Bespoke Parallel, a division of the luxury brokerage that focuses on secondary markets in which it has a smaller presence. Despite his elevated position in the company, Willis was verbally and in text messages called racist epithets by the firm's secretary Lisa Kling and Cody Vichinsky, one of Bespoke's founding partners, in addition to being called "Jafar" by multiple employees, the lawsuit claims.

"But it was [the defendants], and not plaintiffs, who acted in a cartoonish manner beneath the decency of any person with a conscience, and it is they and their misdeeds which shall share, in a metaphorical sense, Jafar's fate as a prisoner of the lamp," the complaint states, cuttingly. "They shall find themselves imprisoned economically by the damages that will be imposed upon them." Read more