Takeaway: While closeness in time between protected activity and adverse action can be a factor to show an employer's bad motive, it is not by itself enough to establish causation, especially if the surrounding circumstances undermine such a claim.
An associate professor at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine could not prove discrimination or retaliation when her supervisor said that she would not promote her 27 days after the professor revealed that she had filed a sexual harassment claim, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.
In 2011, the plaintiff began working as a nontenure/contract track associate professor at Tufts School of Dental Medicine. In June 2017, the plaintiff claimed that a fellow instructor had sexually harassed her. She alleged that the co-worker had asked her out on a date, asked her if she wanted to "have some monkey business," asked her to lift up her lab coat on numerous occasions and leered at her.
Tufts' Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) separately interviewed the plaintiff, co-worker and the school's division head. The OEO investigator could establish only that the co-worker had asked the plaintiff on a date and believed the co-worker's denial as to the rest of the allegations.
In November 2017, the plaintiff decided that she wanted to apply for promotion to full professor. This required her department chair's endorsement and for her to prepare a dossier detailing her experience, which typically took six to 12 months. The dossier had...
Highlights The $549.5 million Perfectus Aluminum settlement is more than ten times larger than the previous record for a customs-related False Claims Act (FCA) resolution and the latest in a stri...