Mohammed Dahbi has been ordered by NYC Commission on Human Rights to pay $14,000 (£10,676) to a lesbian couple who he banned from kissing in the back of his car.
A cabby who claimed he had a “no-kissing policy” in his yellow taxi was hit with was ordered to pay $7,000 each to Christina Spitzer and Kassie Thornton following the incident in October 2011.
The couple claimed Dahbi had called them ‘c**ts, whores and bitches’ and that despite only giving each other a ‘peck’ in the back of the car, they were told to ‘keep that for the bedroom or get out of the cab’.
In his defence, Dahbi responded by claiming he had received verbal abuse during the incident and said the couple called him a ‘f**king Arab terrorist’ and a ‘radical Muslim asshole’.
The driver said the women were ‘all over’ each other, and were blocking his view through the car’s rear view mirror and were distracting him.
He admitted telling the couple to wait ’till you go home’ when he pulled over.
Spitzer claimed that when they took their luggage out of the car and said they would not pay for the fare, Dabhi called them ‘c**ts, whores, bitches’.
Based on emotional damages, the NYC Commission on Human Rights ordered Dabhi to pay the damages to the couple.
They said they based their ruling not on the fact that Dahbi pulled over, but because he told them to ‘stop that behaviour’.
The committee said:
That statement constitutes a ‘declaration…that the patronage of Complainants is ‘unwelcome, objectionable or not acceptable, desired or solicited.”
Dabhi was also ordered to work with the Community Relations Bureau at the Commission for 164 hours.