In Holmes v. Lloyd J. Austin, III, Civil Action No. 23-2415 (LLA), 2024 WL 4345829 (D.D.C. Sept. 30, 2024), the court, inter alia, denied defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s race-based hostile work environment claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From the decision:
Ms. Holmes alleges that Major Sinclair perpetuated a hostile work environment by “verbally abus[ing]” her between November 2018 and March 2019, including by threatening to “write [Ms. Holmes] up” and report her to the Board of Nursing; “stating she did not want to put ‘monkeys in consults,’ ” which Ms. Holmes took to be a derogatory comment about her race; and “publicly berat[ing]” Ms. Holmes in front of her peers.
The standard for hostile work environment cases is a high bar. But the D.C. Circuit has suggested that even the single use of an unambiguously racial epithet might constitute a hostile work environment. Courts in this district have on several occasions faced the question of whether the alleged use of a monkey to depict African American co-workers might, by itself, constitute a hostile work environment. Some have found that the single use of the word “monkey” or a depiction of a monkey directed toward an African American employee is enough to establish a hostile work environment. See, e.g., Burkes v. Holder, 953 F. Supp. 2d 167, 170 (D.D.C. 2013) (denying a motion to dismiss a race-based hostile work environment claim where an employee witnessed a stuffed monkey hanging by its neck in a public work area); Vance, 2019 WL 914010, at *8 (denying summary judgment to afford the plaintiff an opportunity to take discovery into whether a supervisor had “purposefully used … monkey statuettes to refer to his African American [d]irectors in order to draw on the ugly racial imagery of associating African Americans with monkeys”); see also Boyer-Liberto v. Fontainebleau Corp., 786 F.3d 264, 280 (4th Cir. 2015) (en banc) (holding that a jury could find that the “uses of the ‘porch monkey’ epithet—whether viewed as a single incident or as a pair of discrete instances of harassment—were severe enough to engender a hostile work environment”). But see Toomer v. Esper, 464 F. Supp. 3d 157, 170 (D.D.C. 2020) (granting summary judgment in a case involving a “Bigfoot” action figure when the record, after discovery, did not show a racially hostile work environment), aff’d sub nom., Toomer v. Austin, No. 20-5184, 2022 WL 301561 (D.C. Cir. Jan. 21, 2022).
The court cannot conclude, based on the record before it, whether Major Sinclair’s use of the term “monkey” was an unambiguously racial epithet that would, on its own, give rise to a claim for a hostile work environment, but Ms. Holmes’s allegation is certainly sufficient to defeat a motion to dismiss. See Jones v. UPS Ground Freight, 683 F.3d 1283, 1297 (11th Cir. 2012) (“ ‘Given the history of racial stereotypes against African-Americans and the prevalent one of African-Americans as animals or monkeys, it is a reasonable—perhaps even an obvious—conclusion that’ the use of monkey imagery is intended as a ‘racial insult’ where no benign explanation for the imagery appears.” (quoting United States v. Jones, 159 F.3d 969, 977 (6th Cir. 1998))). This is all the more so when Major Sinclair’s comment is viewed in combination with her other disparaging remarks about Ms. Holmes.
[Citations and internal quotation marks omitted.]
Based on this, the court permitted plaintiff to proceed to discovery on her hostile work environment claim based on race.