• December 13, 1993
• Vol. 40
• No. 24

Tipping the Scales of Justice

Bonnie Cook Was Too Fat to Get Hired, but Not Too Fat to Fight Back

HUMILIATION WAS AS FAMILIAR TO Bonnie Cook as her shape in the mirror. At 5'2" and 320 lbs., she was often heckled at the mall where she shopped near her Richmond, R.I., home, with shouts of "Have another doughnut!" And classmates would taunt her sons, Jared, 10, and Joshua, 9, by asking, "Does your mother eat from a trough?"

Cook, 33, could bear the daily insults. But she couldn't bear it when a doctor for the state of Rhode Island told her in 1988 that she was too fat to return to a job she had held twice before as an attendant at a state institution for the mentally retarded. "Yes, I am fat," Cook says. "But by their own admission, I had a spotless record. I was dumbfounded and hurt."

She was also determined to fight back, inspired by her husband, Blain, 34. "He told me, 'Don't let somebody tell you you're too big to do something,' " she says. So Cook contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped her to sue the stale of Rhode Island. It was a painful battle. "It's embarrassing to have the state's lawyer standing up there and implying that I'm only overweight because I don't put down my fork," admits Cook. "He's making all these claims with nothing to back them up."

Yet last month, her perseverance paid off. On Nov. 22, establishing what could be a major legal precedent, a U.S. appeals court upheld a 1992 lower court decision awarding Cook $100,000 in lost wages and compensatory damages and ordering her reinstated in her job at the Joseph II. Ladd Center in Exeter, R.I. "In a society that all too often confuses 'slim' with 'beautiful' or 'good,' morbid obesity can present formidable barriers to employment," wrote Judge Bruce M. Selya, who dismissed the state's argument that obesity was a voluntary condition. In effect, the ruling said that morbid (or severe) obesity could be regarded as a disability, and people who suffer from it should be protected under federal law.

The decision may not help Cook, an inveterate dieter, to lose weight. (She insists she consumes only 1,500 calories a day, far less than Blain, a blind former kitchen worker, who at 5'2" weighs just 140 lbs.) But it has done wonders for her status. "Yesterday I went lo the A&P," says Cook, "and 15 people crowded around me. 'Hey, you're that famous fat lady. Congratulations!' "