Retaliation claim lost by plaintiff due to failure to include it in EEOC charge; highly offensive racial remark kept out at trial
April 24, 2004Watson v. O’Neill, No. 03-1541 (8th Cir. 4/7/04) illustrates a few useful points:
1) If you file an EEOC charge, be sure you include all grounds of discrimination.
2) If you’re defending a discrimination lawsuit, always check the original charge to see if the grounds of discrimination in the lawsuit match those in the charge.
Here the Plaintiff’s retaliation claim was thrown out because it had not been included in the EEOC charge.
Also interesting in this case is the disallowance of evidence of a very nasty racial remark even I choose not to print. (Curious? Read the case.)
It was too remote in time and not made by a key decisionmaker.
Could have gone the other way, and that might have thrown the case the other way too. It was a judgment call; a judges’ discretion on such matters can have a huge impact on the outcome of a lawsuit, and be very difficult to overturn on appeal.
Related Posts
Seventh Circuit case reminds us to examine relationship between EEOC charge and issues raised in complaint in subsequent lawsuit
EEOC Sanctioned for Frivolous Lawsuit
No protection against retaliatory discharge for malicious bad faith filing of unfounded harassment charge
EEOC Starts Focusing On Recruitment and Hiring Discrimination
Case emphasizes discrimination charge relationship to lawsuit allegations; also key points for retaliation cases
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
If you want to leave a feedback to this post or to some other user´s comment, simply fill out the form below.