The Philadelphia Art Museum (PAM) is claiming in a court petition filed on 20 November that Sasha Suda, the director and chief executive fired by the museum’s board earlier this month, had “misappropriated funds from the museum and lied to cover up her theft”. The petition was filed in response to Suda’s lawsuit against the museum on 10 November, in which she alleged “breaches of contract, bad faith, unfair treatment and abuse”, and requested a jury trial, damages and two years’ severance pay. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported news of the museum’s petition.
In a statement shared with The Art Newspaper, a spokesperson for the museum said: “The Philadelphia Art Museum has filed a petition to compel arbitration and stay judicial proceedings in response to the claims made by Sasha Suda. We have no further comment at this time.”
The museum’s petition claims that Suda, who was three years into a five-year contract when she was fired, had repeatedly requested increases in pay from the compensation committee of the museum’s board of trustees. When the committee refused, the petition claims, “Suda took the money anyway, defying the board and violating her contract”. The petition does not specify the sums that Suda allegedly misappropriated; her starting base salary in 2022 was $720,000.
In her lawsuit, Suda claimed that she had received a 3% cost-of-living increase to her salary that was consistent with the contract negotiated with the museum workers’ union in 2022. But she alleged that the museum’s board chair Ellen Caplan had “fabricated a false narrative around Suda’s compensation” as a pretext to conduct a “forensic investigation” of her compensation and expenses, and, ultimately a second vote-of-confidence in which the board’s executive committee elected to fire her.
“The museum’s accusations are false,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer with the firm Quinn Emanuel who is representing Suda, told The Art Newspaper in a statement. “These are the same recycled allegations from the sham investigation that the museum manufactured as a pretext for Suda’s wrongful termination.”
The museum’s petition calls for Suda’s allegations to be dealt with through arbitration, asserting that neither her “meritless breach of contract claim, nor her delusional allegations of victimhood and persecution” deserve to be heard in court.
“The motion, as well as its false narrative, fits the [PAM]’s longstanding pattern of trying to cover up its misconduct and mistreatment of staff,” Nikas said. “We expected the museum would prefer to hide the sordid details about its unlawful treatment of Sasha Suda in a confidential arbitration. If the museum had nothing to hide, it would not be afraid to litigate in state court where we filed the case.”
The day after it filed its petition accusing Suda of theft, the PAM appointed the former Metropolitan Museum of Art director and chief executive Daniel Weiss to replace her. In her lawsuit, Suda claims that Weiss—who previously served as a governance consultant to the museum—had told her of the PAM’s leadership: “It is a very dysfunctional board.”
