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The First Department has sustained a sex and race discrimination claim, restating that pleading standards in state court are quite different from federal law and that the plaintiff in this case has a legitimate claim against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The case is Walker v. Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, issued on October 19. The MTA runs the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Plaintiff had also filed in federal court, asserting a racial discrimination claim. The federal court dismissed that claim under Rule 12 under the stringent Iqbal pleading test, created by the Supreme Court in 2009 to required plaintiffs to assert plausible and nonconclusory claims. But in state court, the Iqbal pleading rule does not apply. State courts still employ "notice pleading," a more plaintiff-friendly test that the federal courts were using prior to 2009.
The federal court dismissed plaintiff's federal discrimination claims but did not rule on the State and City Human Rights Law claims. Here is how the federal judge opened the decision; the first paragraph starts off strong but that was only a prelude to dismissal:
Discrimination has no place in the workplace. Anti-discrimination laws protect employees when they are subjected to disparate treatment, a hostile environment or retaliation at work on the basis of their protected characteristics. But to avail herself of the protection of federal anti-discrimination laws, a plaintiff must plausibly allege that she suffered discrimination because of her protected characteristic(s). Mere recitations of a plaintiff's membership in a protected class and a litany of incidents of poor treatment, without factual connections between the two, do not pass muster.
As plaintiff's federal discrimination claims did not "pass muster," they were dismissed. Plaintiff then filed her claims in state court under the State and City Human Rights Laws. Defendants tried to dismiss those claims on the basis that the federal court had rejected their federal counterparts. But the First Department said the claims in state court are analyzed differently than the claims that were dismissed in federal court. That's because "notice pleading" is still the rule in state court practice. The First Department has said this in the past and it says it again.
On the merits, plaintiff has a claim, the Court says, based on the following facts:
The complaint alleges that she received more intense scrutiny and was excluded from meetings that her male, non-Black peer was invited to join. Defendant Victor Muallem allegedly subjected her to verbal abuse, in the presence of co-workers, clients, opposing counsel and arbitrators on several occasions, and even struck her during an arbitration hearing while she was cross-examining a witness. Plaintiff alleges that this behavior stemmed from discriminatory animus, as Muallem directed it towards only plaintiff and other Black female employees.
We also have a retaliation claim based on plaintiff's assertion that "defendants[] forc[ed] plaintiff to move to an office in extremely close
proximity to her alleged abuser Muallem while ignoring plaintiff's reasonable plea not to do so." In addition, the Court finds plaintiff has a claim under the Gender-Motivated Violence Act, another City law that you don't see in federal practice. She alleged that a male co-worker physically struck her and had directed animus against another Black female employee in the past.
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