A judge has delayed the upcoming trial in a lawsuit brought by two former “General Hospital” crew members who say they were wrongfully fired by ABC after the network denied them an exemption on religious grounds when they objected to ABC’s coronavirus vaccination requirement.
An ABC attorney told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Tony Richardson during a hearing Tuesday that both sides intend to try and resolve the case in May with the help of retired Judge Mitchell Beckloff. The plaintiffs are James Wahl and his son, Timothy James Wahl, both of whom were stage technicians who worked in close contact with unmasked actors.
Richardson rescheduled the jury trial from May 13 to June 9. In February 2024, Judge Stephen Goorvitch, who previously presided over the Wahl case, denied an ABC motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
“The jury, not the judge, must resolve whether plaintiffs had genuine religious beliefs and whether defendant could have reasonably accommodated plaintiffs without posing an undue hardship,” Goorvitch wrote.
In their court papers, the Wahls’ attorneys stated that ABC wrongly characterized the plaintiffs’ objections to vaccination “purely as lifestyle choices that it had no duty to accommodate.”
But in their court papers, ABC attorneys stated that both Wahls admitted they would not take a COVID-19 vaccine under any circumstances, even if the shot had been developed without any connection to fetal stems cell, because they adhered to the principles of homeopathic medicine.
They were fired in 2021.