In Ramirez v. City of New York, No. 24-CV-1061 (AS), 2026 WL 18678 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 2, 2026), the court, inter alia, denied defendant’s motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s retaliation (but not disability discrimination) claim under the Rehabilitation Act.
From the decision:
The test for retaliation under the Rehabilitation Act has four parts: (1) the plaintiff was engaged in protected activity, (2) the alleged retaliator knew that the plaintiff was involved in protected activity, (3) an adverse decision or course of action was taken against plaintiff, and (4) a causal connection exists between the protected activity and the adverse action. Summary judgment isn’t warranted for defendants on any of these elements.
First, Ramirez isn’t clear what protected activity she was engaged in, but the Court construes her complaint as referring to the general act of bringing litigation. Defendants don’t contest that Ramirez suing them is protected activity but instead point out that Ramirez’s complaint and briefing don’t identify the protected activity precisely. That point is well taken. Ramirez identifies four actions: (1) the Court’s denial of defendants’ first motion to dismiss (August 22, 2024), (2) Ramirez’s filing of her amended complaint (September 6, 2024), (3) defendants’ filing of their second motion to dismiss (September 20, 2024), and (4) the Court’s denial of that motion (December 19, 2024). Of course, only one of these is Ramirez’s own action—filing the complaint. But that action is nonetheless protected.
Second, defendants have waived any argument that they didn’t know that Ramirez was suing them. Their initial summary judgment brief doesn’t mention this at all. It isn’t until their reply brief that they contest it. It is well-settled, however, that an argument raised for the first time in a reply brief is waived.
Third, defendants cannot argue that denying Ramirez’s accommodation isn’t an adverse action. Unlike as in the discrimination context, “denials of accommodations can constitute adverse actions in the retaliation context.”
Fourth, there’s a genuine dispute of material fact about whether the denial of accommodations was causally connected to Ramirez’s lawsuit. Defendants argue that three months had passed between when she filed her amended complaint in September and when her request for accommodations was denied in December. Of course, “[c]lose temporal proximity … may in itself be sufficient to establish the requisite causal connection,” Kaytor v. Elec. Boat Corp., 609 F.3d 537, 552 (2d Cir. 2010), but the Second Circuit “has not drawn a bright line defining, for the purposes of a prima facie case, the outer limits beyond which a temporal relationship is too attenuated to establish causation.” Gorzynski v. JetBlue Airways Corp., 596 F.3d 93, 110 (2d Cir. 2010); see Gorman-Bakos v. Cornell Co-op Extension of Schenectady Cnty., 252 F.3d 545, 555 (2d Cir. 2001) (finding that five months isn’t too long). Here, the December denial of Ramirez’s request for an extension was the first time in the record that Ramirez had asked for an extension since filing her suit.1 When Ramirez previously asked for an extension before suing, Taylor not only endorsed it but wrote that there weren’t any problems with her work. It was only after the lawsuit that his story changed. Suddenly there were lots of problems with Ramirez dropping the ball because of working from home. A jury could find that the denial was caused by her bringing and maintaining her suit. Of course, Taylor says he didn’t know anything about the lawsuit. But that’s a question of credibility for the jury to decide.
(Cleaned up.)
This decision thus illustrates that credibility are predominantly jury questions, and that summary judgment is generally an inappropriate means of resolving such questions as a matter of law.