The wife of a Manhattan financier hired a nanny for her baby, but freaked out when she realized the caretaker was African-American and fired off a text message saying, “NOOOOOOOOOOO ANOTHER BLACK PERSON,” a lawsuit alleges.
Lynsey Plasco-Flaxman, a Tribeca mother of two, wrote the message for her spouse, Joel Plasco, upon meeting new nanny Giselle Maurice for her first day at work in 2016.
Only she didn’t send the text to Plasco — she accidentally sent it to Maurice. Twice.
When she realized the gaffe, Plasco-Flaxman immediately fired the experienced caretaker, saying she felt “uncomfortable.”
She said that their outgoing nanny was African-American and had done a bad job — and that they were expecting a Filipino.
Now Maurice, 44, is suing the couple for discrimination and seeking compensation for wages she says she was promised — $350-a-day for a six-month live-in gig.
“[I want] to show them, look, you don’t do stuff like that,” Maurice told The Post Friday, saying they paid her for the single day’s work and sent her home in an Uber.
“I know it’s discrimination.”
But the family says their actions were reasonable, arguing they couldn’t trust Maurice after offending her.
“[My wife] had sent her something that she didn’t mean to say. She’s not a racist. We’re not racist people,” Plasco, co-chairman of the Dalmore Group investment bank, told The Post on Friday.
“But would you put your children in the hands of someone you’ve been rude to, even if it was by mistake? Your newborn baby? Come on.”
Maurice said she never would have treated the child any differently because of her mom’s text.
“This is my reputation. Why would I do something to a baby?” she said.
“I was willing to work with her and prove her wrong, but it was her conscience, and she couldn’t work with me anymore.”
Maurice said she had tried to settle the dispute through mediation and filed the suit after that didn’t work out.
Plasco said that they didn’t owe her any more money because there was no contract, and that the suit is just “extortion.”
“I’m not someone who has millions of dollars lying around to just pay off people that are coming after me for extortion. And now you’re playing straight into her hands,” fumed the banker, who once ran the UK’s biggest brokerage firm.
“My wife was two months off having a baby, suffering from a very difficult situation. You’re going to go after someone like that? That’s not a very nice thing to do.”