Studies have proven that people who are good-looking get better jobs and promoted faster than people who are not. But according to Debrahlee Lorenzana, a financial-services professional the Village Voice calls “a head-turning beauty” with “J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack,” you can also be too good-looking to succeed. Last summer, Lorenzana was fired from a job she’d held at the Chrysler Building branch of Citigroup after, she says, she was warned repeatedly that her clothes were too distracting, tight, and inappropriate. But in her lawsuit against the bank, Lorenzana says that the bank was merely discriminating against her for her God-given good looks, her Latina heritage (“Where I’m from, women dress up — like put on makeup and do their nails — to go to the supermarket. We’re feminine”), and for the fact that she was a sexy, proud woman in general. To make these points, she repeatedly disses her female colleagues.
For instance, she points out, her outfits were nothing compared to the ones worn by other women in the building. When a colleague gently suggested that her pants were too tight, she tells the Voice, she fought back, saying, “If you want to talk about inappropriate clothes, go downstairs and look at some of the tellers!”
And those were the ones who bothered covering up their crotches at all!
Sluts! What her managers were reacting to, Lorenzana alleges in her suit, wasn’t her clothes, it was her. She was simply, compared to the other women, too well put-together, too magnetic, too good-looking.
“It’s so tiring,” Lorenzana tells the Voice. “My entire life, I’ve been dealing with this. I couldn’t take it anymore!” Thankfully, she appears to be in capable hands. Her lawyer, Jack Tuckner, “had a professional photographer shoot her in various work outfits in his office near Wall Street” as part of a lawsuit. That will show them.
