A 14-day gap between an HR complaint and a PIP sits at the center of the lawsuit
A former HubSpot engineering lead says the company punished him for taking parental leave, then fired him days after he outed himself as a whistleblower.
Jonathan Turnbull-Reilly filed the complaint on May 7, 2026, in the US District Court for the Western District of New York. He is suing HubSpot, Inc. and his former manager, Varun Khanna, under Title VII, the New York State Human Rights Law, and New York's whistleblower statute, Labor Law § 740.
For HR leaders, the case is a study in how routine workforce decisions - a performance review, a PIP, an investigation timeline - can be reframed as a retaliation pattern when they cluster around protected activity.
Turnbull-Reilly joined HubSpot as an Engineering Lead in June 2024 at a base salary of $245,000, with total compensation of about $395,000 including stock. According to the complaint, he told Khanna early on that his wife was pregnant. The role, he says, was framed as a management job. The filing points to a September 9, 2024 Slack message from Khanna setting "Global Home planning and execution" as Priority Zero and describing coding as work that "run in parallel always" and could be delegated.
His son was born in late November 2024. He took parental leave under HubSpot's company policy.
According to the filing, the trouble started after he returned in February 2025. Within twelve days, the complaint says, Khanna rolled out a new...
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