A man has filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles court against actress Rosario Dawson, the girlfriend of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, and three members of her family, accusing them of violent abuse and discriminating against him for his transgender status, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
Dedrek Finley seeks damages in the lawsuit, saying that he moved from Beacon, New York, to Los Angeles in December 2017 to work for the Dawson family to "renovate and remodel Rosario's personal residence."
He later moved into a North Hollywood home rented by the family and announced that he is a transgender, telling the family that he would now be known as Dedrek and use he/him pronouns.
The lawsuit claims that after Finley did this, “the family misgendered him multiple times each day, with deliberate indifference as to the appropriate way to address him, emphasizing that Rosario Dawson, “did nothing to correct the situation.”
The lawsuit also alleges that in February of last year, the family ordered Finley to move out of the house, but he refused because there was no legal grounds for them to do so.
In the lawsuit, Finley alleges that the family used various methods to try and get him out of the house, including assaulting him, threatening to kill his cat, shutting off the gas and, in general, making his living conditions there uninhabitable, according to Newsweek.
Finley’s lawyer Tasha Alyssa Hill told NBC News that “we reached out numerous times to the Dawson family attorney seeking to resolve this before having to file suit.”
But, after receiving no response, Hill said the lawsuit was filed last week before the statute of limitations expired.
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