Marko Lens is a celebrated expert on melanoma who frequently travels internationally from Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in his native Serbia. It’s expected that he would be part of the HON Circle, the honorary membership in the Lufthansa Group, a German company that owns Swiss Air Lines and Austrian Airlines. Less expected was the pattern of homophobic, anti-Serbian abuse he says he suffered from the airlines starting in 2011; abuse that earned him four recent court victories for discrimination and defamation in two different countries, but which Lufthansa Group has yet to apologize for.
Over the phone, Lens passionately lays out the trouble he endured, which began in March 2011, when a Swiss Air flight attendant, Myrto Avedik, allegedly called him “Serbian swine.” Lens says he tried to log a formal complaint, was temporarily banned from flying on the airline for six months instead. He waited out the ban, but worse was to come, and it took the form of joint station manager Dorit Rosenberg in 2012.
Rosenberg, who is Austrian, was working as the joint station manager in the Nikola Tesla airport for both Swiss Air Lines and Austrian Airlines. “I met her at the end of September 2012,” Lens says, which was after his ban had ended. “I was introduced because of my HON status. When I met her, she told me she’d heard about the time that a Swiss flight attendant called me a Serbian pig. She told me, ‘I don’t understand how it is possible that you have a big career, because you are Serbian.’”
Lens says it didn’t stop there. He says Rosenberg went on to tell him that Serbians are known criminals and thieves, that the United States was right to bomb Serbia in 1999, referring to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in that year, and that she hated gay people. At this point, Lens says he realized Rosenberg was unstable and he disengaged. “But Belgrade airport is small,” he says. “I kept running into her all the time, and she was always saying things like, ‘You stupid Serbian, you Serbian cow.’”
Over the course of the following months, into spring of 2013, Lens says Rosenberg’s comments became unbearable, and he told her he was going to report her to her superiors. In response, Lens says Rosenberg told him, “I don’t care. In my office, there are two rules. Number one is I’m always right, and number two is no one can override rule number one.” Indeed, when Lens brought Rosenberg’s behavior to her boss, he says he was accused of lying and spreading false information, and he was threatened to be banned from flying again.
The treatment, Lens says, got worse. He says Rosenberg called him an “ugly faggot,” and says she told other employees not to attend to him. In 2014, the year of Belgrade’s first Pride Parade since 2010 when marchers were violently attacked, Lens says Rosenberg asked him if he had attended the parade, which had gone on without incident that year. He says Rosenberg told him there should have been more fighting at the event, because “all faggots should be killed.”
It was at this point that Lens says he decided to sue. “I called the chief executive of the Lufthansa Group,” he says, but in response, he says he was banned from flying. “I got an answer from Swiss, where I was told I’d been asked not to send any emails to any employees, and that we can only talk via lawyer. I started court proceedings.” In the fall of 2014, Lens initiated legal proceedings in Vienna (against Austrian Airlines) and in Belgrade (against Swiss International Air Lines).
“After three years of fighting, I won the case in court,” he says. In fact, he won the case in four courts: the City Court and Court of Appeals in Vienna, and the High Court and Court of Appeals in Belgrade. The courts in both countries independently confirmed severe and extended discrimination based on nationality and sexual orientation against Lens. He says his victory, however, wasn’t easy. It took the courage of other witnesses at the airline to step forward, some of whom, Lens says, lost their jobs.
One such witness is Tanja Stojkovic Jovanovic, a former employee of Swiss Air Lines who testified in court to verify Rosenberg’s assaults, but who also spoke about her own experiences with Rosenberg. “I spent 36 years working at the airport in Belgrade, but after many decades of pressure I had to withdraw and leave my job,” she told Večernje novosti, a Serbian tabloid. “I’m glad the truth about how Rosenberg humiliated some of us came out.”
In the end, Lens was awarded 500,000 RSD, Serbian currency, as well as 200,000 RSD for court expenses. Swiss Air also had to pay for 12 pages of advertisement in Politika, Serbia’s newspaper-of-record, containing the verdict in full. It was published as a supplement on July 11, and it was the first time such a verdict was published in Serbia. In total, Lens’ case cost Lufthansa Group 3 million RSD, or around 25,000 euros. Lens donated the money he was awarded to a hospital that treats children with disabilities in Belgrade.
But while Lens says he is pleased with the results from the courts, he says he has not yet received an apology from Lufthansa Group, nor has Rosenberg been adequately reprimanded. In fact, Rosenberg has since been promoted and currently works in Houston, Texas, for the company, despite the courts’ confirmation that her actions were discriminatory.
them. has reached out to Lufthansa Group for comment, but has not yet received a response. Head of media relations Karin Müller at Swiss Air Lines, however, said over email, “We respect the court’s ruling, even though it does not reflect our own legal opinion. We will study this ruling in detail and decided on our next steps. In view of this, we will not be commenting further on this matter at the present time.”
Meanwhile, Lens says his status as a Serbian means there may be no justice. “They don’t care about Serbians,” he says bluntly. “If this case was brought up in the U.S., frankly, this would cost them millions for the emotional pain they caused. You know what I got? About 4,200 euros.”
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