New England Biz Law Update
A plaintiff who was reassigned months after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could not hold her employer liable under Title VII for retaliation, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.
Plaintiff Carmen Quintana-Dieppa brought suit against her employer, the Department of the Army, in a federal trial court. After the Army’s motion for summary judgment was allowed, the plaintiff filed an appeal.
“Quintana’s position is that her Army supervisors retaliated against her by reassigning her after learning that she had filed an EEOC complaint,” Judge Gustavo A. Gelpí wrote for the three-judge 1st Circuit panel.
“She attempts to link her protected conduct and the purportedly retaliatory act by pointing to temporal proximity — i.e., according to Quintana, her November 2017 involuntarily reassignment came shortly after her supervisors learned about the EEOC action at a meeting in July or August of 2017 with one of the individuals Quintana named in her EEOC complaint,” Gelpi said.
“The Army stresses that it reassigned Quintana because it had ‘serious and substantiated concerns’ about her ‘management style and treatment of employees under her supervision.’ These concerns were supported by the findings from the Army’s two investigations, which were based on statements by many of her subordinates,” he noted.
“Accepting Quintana’s version of events at face value, we doubt that the three- or four-month period between the two events would suffice to establish the causal link required for even a prima facie showing of retaliation. … However, we need not rest our opinion on this basis. Simply put, although very close ‘temporal proximity may suffice for a prima facie case of retaliation,’ it ‘does not satisfy [Quintana’s] ultimate burden to establish that the true explanation’ for her reassignment ‘was retaliation for engaging in protected conduct rather than poor performance.’ … Here, apart from at best modest temporal proximity, Quintana has provided no other evidence that the Army’s reasons for reassigning her were pretextual,” Gelpí stated.
The 33-page decision is Quintana-Dieppa v. Department of the Army.
