Seyi Omooba confirms tribunal appeal following £300k costs order

Seyi Omooba will appeal against the outcome of her employment tribunal versus Curve and Global Artists, as well as a ruling that she pay their costs, her legal team has confirmed.

She is facing a costs bill in excess of £300,000, subject to assessment, after unsuccessfully pursuing a claim against the theatre and her former agency for religious discrimination and breach of contract.

The actor is supported by the Christian Legal Centre, which has confirmed that she will challenge both the tribunal ruling and the decision to award costs. It has estimated that Omooba’s bill could exceed £350,000.

CLC said the ruling had upheld Omooba being “cancelled and hounded out of her promising career”, when it rejected her claim at a tribunal hearing in February, concluding that Curve and Global did not drop her because of her religious beliefs.

Omooba’s dismissal from Curve’s production of The Color Purple and later from Global, in 2019, followed the re-emergence of anti-gay comments she had made on Facebook.

She had been cast in The Color Purple as the lead character, Celie, and faced accusations of hypocrisy for agreeing to play a gay role. During the tribunal, Omooba admitted that she had not read the script of the musical before being cast in the show, and would have refused to play the character as a lesbian if asked.

Andrea Williams, chief executive of CLC’s parent organisation Christian Concern, described the costs order as unprecedented as she announced that Omooba would appeal.

“An employment tribunal is meant to be a cost-free forum. For the other side to apply for and have granted a £350,000 costs order is unprecedented and deliberately punitive. It is designed to frighten and put off others from seeking justice.


“The costs they are asking for are 15 times more than the usual costs of defending a tribunal case, which is rather difficult to square with their premise that her case was so hopeless that it was unreasonable for her to pursue it.”

In a judgement explaining its decision to award costs, the tribunal acknowledged that it was not common for the unsuccessful party in an employment tribunal to pay the other side’s costs, but that an order could be made in circumstances where a party had acted “vexatiously, abusively, destructively or otherwise unreasonably” or when a claim had “no reasonable prospect of success”.

Williams said that despite Curve and Global’s arguments during the tribunal, it was “undeniable that Seyi’s claim raises difficult and important issues about the intolerance of Christian beliefs on human sexuality in today’s society”.


“The tribunal has effectively joined the campaign of ‘cancelling’ Seyi for her Christian beliefs. She and we are not intimidated and we have now lodged an appeal,” she added.

CLC said cross-examination proceedings during the tribunal hearing were “successful in muddying the waters” about why Omooba was dropped from the show.

Williams added: “At the time of her dismissal, nobody knew or cared whether Seyi had read the script, and whether she would be willing to play the character as a lesbian one. All the decision-makers knew or cared about were her Christian beliefs, as evidenced by her four-year-old Facebook post, which she refused to retract.”