WACO, Texas — The Oakley's Texas Bar and Grill in Waco is losing business and receiving threats after a former employee claims she was fired for her weight and looks.
The employee, who 6 News is not naming, made the initial post on Facebook with a thread of text messages from current employees and the general manager.
She says she was hired two weeks postpartum and her job told her she wasn't losing the baby weight fast enough. In the thread, the general managers says, "Mark is strict on the Oakley's image."
"When I use the term Mark's image, that's been just kind of like Hooters has an image or Twin Peaks has an image and stuff like that," the general manager said. "It's not anything new. I mean, it's been around for 21 years."
"When you sign up for this job, you sign a contract," one current employee said. "You have to keep an image."
The former waitress additionally posted a TikTok saying, "They basically told me I was too fat to work there, I was not pretty enough to work there."
The general manager who hired her says the former employee is the sister of a long-term employee. She was struggling with money, so the general manager decided to talk to her beforehand about what it's like to start the job after having a baby.
The general manager says she personally knew what it was like to come into a job postpartum.
"I was pregnant here, had my first child here, know what it's like coming in six weeks postpartum," the general manager said. "It's like a mental toll on you, and so, I was talking to her about it and she said that she understood."
"It can be very upsetting, I guess the context of the text messages," another current waitress said. "Things that weren't seen in the text messages were our manager as well wanting to go in and being like, let's, let's get healthy together. It wasn't like, 'Oh, you're fat, you're ugly', nothing like that."
Oakley's current employees are frustrated and share that the post doesn't show the whole truth. They say the former employee's weight was never an issue and that their team is diverse. They say she was fired for cause.
"It was literally her taking other people's tables and getting into an argument with every waitress on her shift," the general manager said.
"There was plenty of other reasons stuff that I personally saw her doing," a current waitress said. "I saw her rip a credit card out of another waitresses hand to get the table."
The backlash has caused stress for the business as they are now losing customers.
"My personal regulars tell me that they're not coming up here anymore, at least for a long while, and that they're sorry to me, but that they're not going to support an establishment that talks to people like that," a current waitress said. "We had people calling the bar saying that they were going to come you know, do bad things here to us and that we were just terrible, people screaming, hollering cussing at us over the bar phone. It was scary."
"I actually like, brought my pepper spray in because it was like, I don't know if someone will come in here, you know, threatening us or trying to act a certain way," another current employee said. "It is just getting out of hand. We had no clue what we were coming into."
6 News has been in contact with the former employee. She cannot speak on the matter at this time.
Additionally, 6 News contacted her attorney to see what action is being taken on their hand and how many people are stepping forward. They have yet to comment on the incident.