Sexual harassment case dismissed after trial court says plaintiff manufactured text messages

This case sounds like a lawyer's nightmare. A federal judge determined that a plaintiff alleging sexual harassment manufactured some text messages from the alleged harasser in an effort to improve her case. The client got sanctioned and the case was dismissed. Her law firm also got sanctioned. The Court of Appeals upholds the client sanction but determines that the trial court needs to reconsider the attorney sanction.

The case is Rossbach . Montefiore Medical Group, issued on August 28, Plaintiff was a nurse who claimed her supervisor, Morales, subjected her to sexual harassment and that Morales and another supervisor fired her after she complained about it. After the district court denied summary judgment on the sexual harassment claim, the Hospital filed a motion claiming that some of the harassment evidence was manufactured by plaintiff in the form of bogus, sexually-suggestive text messages.

The district court determined that plaintiff made-up the text messages. On that basis, the court dismissed the hostile work environment claim as a sanction. The trial court also awarded Montefiore attorneys' fees in the amount of $157,000. What convinced the court that the texts were fake was that while plaintiff said she could not photograph the phone-screen (to prove the text was authentic) because the screen was cracked and had "ink bleed," the image of the text messages did not depict any screen damage, and defendant's expert gave convincing testimony that the text message were faked, in part because there was no metadata to prove the texts were real. The trial court also said plaintiff committed perjury in testifying at deposition about the text messages and spoliated evidence in refusing to provide the correct passcode for her iPhone and disposing of a related iPhone during litigation. The Court of Appeals affirms this sanction, noting that appellate courts will defer to the trial court's factual findings on these issues.

Plaintiff's lawyer also got sanctioned by the district court, which said the lawyer did not conduct a reasonable investigation into this issue when the Hospital's lawyer brought it to his attention and allowed plaintiff to spoliate evidence by failing to adequately advise plaintiff to preserve her iPhones and her data. That sanction is reversed on appeal because the trial court used the wrong standard in failing to consider whether any omissions by counsel were done in bad faith, which is required when lawyers are facing sanctions in the course of their representational relationship with the client. Also, monetary sanctions, such those imposed here against the law firm, also require a showing of bad faith. The case returns to the district court to see if the bad faith requirement is met.