discrimination because of our laws has taken a more sophisticated tone and because of that it's incumbent upon the courts to look be armed the mere allegations as in this case that there was a legitimate nondiscriminatory business practice that was engaged in on that mother's day in the year two thousand and one what the hotel would have this court believe on the existence of reservation with the group that ultimately got the room but at the same time recognizes that ne the hotel argues that mr lindsey did not give adequate notice under the contract of seventy two hours and pointed to a letter dated forty eight hours which confirms many items in addition seven months before the invent outlining the plans for the following your mother's day event talking about the grand ballroom because i'm talking about the one of picked up an average someplace that there was a in the first place there was a payment which was seventy two hours in advance but was there also an oral statement and i said to the hotel as to the number is so important is they had to know the numbers of people to get to the final price so by necessarily telling panache ok you have to write a check for eighty five hundred dollars and something cents they have to have  ballroom that's our writing confirming the space that is being negotiated under the contract you have these faxes going back and forth with regard to staging can drape all the requirements how the tables will be set these are these are talking ones from the west into mr lindsay and yet they come back and they say he didn't have any right to the grand ballroom it's not that two days before the event they said i'm sorry we made a mistake we can accept your money unless you agree to take other space so you have the prime that they share is they accept the money they jacob start meet with mr lindsey and his associates in the group by his own sworn testimony he says he never never considered moving the coming group ye diagram they're closing the grand ballroom they're not even standing up the entire space so that's what you have to look behind you have to say look here's somebody who is violating their own stated hotel policy to accommodate white groups in the grand ballroom two hundred fifty people and you're making a hotel decision to see deposition that he looked at the file for the panache group and found that they had not paid timely or they had not given account timely which isn't true discrimination and it's important for the justice to have a perspective my clients are in the hospitality business they will often be in situations where on one side you have one group wanting something and on another side you have another  ok you're still dealing with two groups with protected status under the long that if for some reason the termination occurs both would have standing to bring this it so that the rock in a hard place that we're in right now is that if the event had gone to parties had some contract they would need to demonstrate in this case the part of a promise they should case that that they had a contractual right to the grand ballroom and that somehow we interfered with and said as a minimum that the hotel people that handle these hopefully the law can can can can allow people to make good faith decisions and what he did was made of good faith decision not predicated on race he looked at the very documents that the hotel lies upon in looking at these matters the booking sheet the recap was the hotel reserved for the commies the grand ballroom first and he also understood that that at that point and i would point to the record of the supplemental excerpts at page you are racist in that context mr stark has to have that knowledge in order to attribute that stigma to to to my client he did not have that knowledge the knowledge that if you had there was someone there on she quit we don't know where she was there was an attempt to contact her but i think it was a couple of days beforehand or a day before hand and we didn't even know that she had quit you know at the time that we were making these decisions mr clark did try to reach miss documents that were in our system showed the panache group in the grand concourse and in the concourse rooms and it showed that the ramona group and the grand ballroom so if you look at the documents there is no apparent that that again they booked at the same time that they put their deposits at the same time they have not demonstrated that they were in the same state of being set up when you know again they've not demonstrated based simply discrimination that race was the reason for the difference in treatment and that was wholly lacking there are no stores here there's no us that will have a policy that this grand ballroom was reserved for whites only or it was reserved is a customer service issue and not discrimination or that mr stark today mr sparks the at the town will work and there he is your honor and again for the record and i you know we didn't put it in because we didn't think it was an issue but we in the record that they you offered some alternatives to using the grand ballroom but is there something in the record that shows that after this occurred you offered them some additional freebies i will i will i will  honor that that particular aspects not there because we didn't think that it would be irrelevant but in response to your honest question the point is we dealt with this as a customer service issue this is not a situation that we don't want the panache to back our ho town it's not that's not the issue the issue is for whatever reason there was a snafu ok and we don't know exactly what the basis of that is misplaced renate williams wasn't there but at every step we took steps to deal with the conveyed and based upon that that's what they did again yesterday the one problem is is the policy i guess maybe star himsel upon what they know at the time that's not what we're doing with you we're dealing with a difference that ok where there's a problem ok they're just not who this man must make a rush to see the snap decision as to what to do ok there are other factors that didn't they before the contract was signed with armani then they started some discussions they those discussions were not memorialize an agreement in fact they specifically refused to commit to  those issues until there was a final contract mr lindsay himself made changes to the contract once it was drafted never including specifically the grand ballroom as the space location and again from the standpoint of mr stark he's looking at the have some sort of an unexpected conflict that's that's not what he was speaking to him he was saying as a matter of course at the time of initial booking those are factors that the company would one apply but the records that he had in the system that he look trying to illustrate is that the reasons he utilized none of them were awful you know whatever transpired where there per haps for a cause of action for like breach of contract but of action of intentional discrimination intentional discrimination requires a mens rea on it requires the state of mind to discriminate in even if using wrong even in poor you know poor judgment he deviated from particular policies there's nothing in this record to demonstrate that mr stark of making this decision did it based upon a racist intent or racial intimate there's nothing or can a corporation have to mess if a corporation there was a document in and without reference to around right that is correct but in terms of our our internal documents the ones that mr parker large upon those documents show that the kamani in our system and have had been reserved at the grand ballroom internal working records or something nobody knows about except they are in the records of the hotel it's not clear to me your honor that previously to this event they have been given a copy of that i don't know if at some point in this williams review the documents with them are not i just don't know but what i do know is that those are the documents that that mr williams initially input into the system the person they were working with and those are the documents that mr struck relied upon in a situation where you're making a snap decision having no history whatsoever it is not racist or unreasonable to rely upon your documents to assess who's entitle to this room and again in the absence of what we are suggesting here every time you have a dispute a waiter served in the sewer then another table ok and that's in the first decided that we have you don't always have situations where you're dealing with people of different races or different backgrounds or what have you every one of those disputes with therefore be subject in so the room where they put the panache croup the banquet style more than the current main group and so you're looking at this fact again that they never event it doesn't address that issue and i would think just as a general proposition of knowledge which employees of the company have which relate to the subject matter of the dispute would be attributed to the corporation is that true where you have a charge of intentional discrimination or some distinction there well no it has to be because if it isn't have these are you know corporate soulless entities that are allowed to go out and have discriminatory policies because doesn't shock the court but here's the starwood hotels they are a four point one billion dollar corporation with hotels all over the world they don't have an anti discrimination policy for dealing with the public how can you fire people that do these kinds of things if they are not violating your company's policies and yes mr stark is still there and until they do have a policy they will yeah sure i will i will say what i had said previously we have attempted to resolve this matter afterwards we've not put on the record exactly how are you not going to resolve it by saying well next instead they're looking for one hundred million dollars over over with basically is a customer service issue at worst so so we try and you know a part of a part of a company is the value of their reputation and they value their hotels have it i suppose and work out some other maybe a charity that always seems to work the i'm a i'm an old district g