The Court of Appeals has reinstated a plaintiff's sex discrimination verdict, holding that the trial court had improperly thrown out the verdict because the jury was able to find that the plaintiff, a doctor working for NYU Langone, suffered a retaliatory termination because she spoke out against sex discrimination in the workplace. This ruling includes a number of interesting holdings and principles relevant to Title VII claims.
The case is Edelman v. NYU Langone Health System, issued on June 18. In September 2017, After plaintiff's three-year contract was renewed for another three-year period in 2017, an incident transpired with Joseph Antonik, the site director at Lake Success, who flailed his arms and called plaintiff a "bitch" when she complained that her contract did not require her to share an office. The next day, Plaintiff complained to HR about this sexist comment, and management immediately discussed the complaint with Antonik. A week later, another supervisor, Kaplan, who interrupted plaintiff's consultation with patients about the office-sharing plan, prompting Kaplan to tell her to "calm down" when she got upset and spoke to her in a child-like manner; this incident led to another complaint to HR, objecting specifically to the "male chauvinism" at the hospital. Plaintiff filed another discrimination complaint with HR on November 1, 2019, and she again objected on November 13, 2019 that she was the victim of retaliation over the office space issue. Her contract was not renewed on November 6, 2020, over a year following plaintiff's last discrimination complaint.
The jury reached a verdict in plaintiff's favor on the retaliation claim under federal, state, and city law, awarding her $700,000 in damages. The trial court vacated that verdict post-trial. The Court of Appeals (Walker, Robinson and Merriam) reinstates the verdict, explaining as follows:
1. After applying the "general corporate knowledge" principle in finding that the named defendants were presumably aware of plaintiff's protected activity (her discrimination complaints), the Court of Appeals turns to the causation element, emphasizing that courts must be wary about granting judgment as a matter of law in discrimination cases since these disputes often turn on circumstantial evidence; this caution is particularly critical when the jury reaches a plaintiff's verdict, the Court says. I have not seen the Court make that last point in a post-trial JMOL ruling. But it is consistent with the Second Circuit's strong deference toward the jury's assessment of the evidence. The Court rarely upsets a plaintiff's verdict on appeal.
2. The jury was able to reach a verdict against Antonik because, almost immediately after plaintiff had again complained about discrimination in the workplace, he directed the office manager to prepare records documenting plaintiff's purported "issues; the first entry was made only one day after plaintiff had followed up with HR about her complaint. While plaintiff had worked there for five years, no such log had ever been prepared before, and the log did not cite any allegations prior to her discrimination complaints. Moreover, defendants' witnesses testified that none of the "for cause" justifications in plaintiff's contract warranted the termination of her contract. The Court says, "it is difficult to discern any reason for the creation of the log and the gathering of information about Edelman other than the desire to ensure that her contract not be renewed," as defendants' issues with plaintiff were not shared with her or any supervisors. As for the year-long delay between plaintiff's protected activity and her termination, the Court invokes the "first actual opportunity to retaliate" principle, as the jury could find that defendants waited until her contract was up for renewal before retaliating against her.
3. We've got a "cat's paw" holding, which says the employer may be liable for discrimination if a discriminatory influences the adverse employment action and the final decisionmaker is negligent in relying on that input. The Court finds the decisionmaker, in following Antonik's directive to fire plaintiff, did not sufficiently double-check the adverse allegations against her, conducting only a "limited inquiry."
4. The Court finds that, in response to plaintiff's prima facie case of retaliation, management did not articulate a neutral reason for terminating her employment, as they admitted the sole basis for her termination was the information gathered by Antonik and Kaplan in support of her termination, and that information was infected by their retaliatory motives. This dispenses with any need to apply the third step of the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting scheme: whether plaintiff was fired for pretextual reasons. It is the rare case when the Court of Appeals finds there is no need to consider whether the plaintiff was fired for pretextual reasons. This holding is similar to those finding that the jury was able to rely on direct evidence of discriminatory or retaliatory intent without considering whether the employer advanced a false reason for the adverse action.
5. As for the retaliation verdict against Kaplan, the Court says the trial court got it wrong in vacating it, as well. Kaplan also had retaliatory intent, the Court holds, because he knew about plaintiff's protected activity, he knew it was based on gender, and when he met with plaintiff about her complaint, he told her to "calm down" and spoke to her in a "condescending tone, raising his voice in a child-like manner to placate [plaintiff's] disagreement." Since Kaplan and Antonik were directly involved in the effort to gather adverse information about plaintiff which led to her termination, the jury had a basis to find against this defendant. The "calm down" evidence, along with testimony about Kaplan's "condescending" response to plaintiff's complaints, is the first time this Court, to my knowledge, has held this evidence can support a sex discrimination case.
6. This case once again tells us that the New York State Human Rights Law, amended in 2019 to relax the evidentiary standards needed to prevail, is aligned with the New York City Human Rights Law, amended in 2015 to provider greater protections to discrimination victims than available under Title VII.