In Kozak v. Office Depot, Inc., 2025 WL 898979 (W.D.N.Y. March 25, 2025), the court, inter alia, held that defendant’s motion for summary judgment should have been denied – and thus disagreed with the Magistrate Judge’s decision to the contrary – as to plaintiff’s sex discrimination claim asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From the decision:
This Court agrees with Kozak that—viewing the facts in her favor—there is a material question of fact as to whether Office Depot’s rationale for firing her was a pretext. More specifically, if a jury were to credit Kozak, they could reasonably conclude that the investigation was a “sham”; from that, the jury could infer animus on the part of Bryan. Indeed, because Kozak’s alleged rejection of McGovern’s advances set in motion a series of events and decisions that at least temporally led to Kozak’s termination, that inference is common sense.
It is true, as Judge McCarthy observed, that courts are not super-personnel departments, and, therefore, “ ‘the reliability of the evidence supporting [the employer’s] conclusions’ is not the critical issue.” Docket Item 187 at 43, 46 (quoting McPherson v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Educ., 457 F.3d 211, 216 (2d Cir. 2006)). That is “because ‘[i]n a discrimination case…[the court is] decidedly not interested in the truth of the allegations against [the] plaintiff[,’] but rather ‘in what motivated the employer.” Id. at 46 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting McPherson, 457 F.3d at 216). Thus, “[w]hat matters is that [the employer] relied on the results of its investigation—flawed or not—as the basis to terminate [the plaintiff’s] employment.” Leiner v. Fresenius Kabi USA, LLC, 2019 WL 5683003, at *8 (W.D.N.Y. Nov. 1, 2019).
So if, for example, Kozak had been fired because of her alleged drinking problem—wholly apart from and unrelated to her sexual harassment allegations—that would be a different story. In that instance, this Court would not delve into the reliability of the evidence demonstrating a drinking problem or the believability of the witnesses. Cf. Flanagan, 2025 WL 18151, at *2 (finding that plaintiff had “fail[ed] to raise a genuine dispute that the reason Trader Joe’s proffered for her termination”—her “recent performance” and her “decision to take vacation during a critical period when Trader Joe’s struggled to deal with the consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak in mid-March 2020”—was pretext (internal quotation marks omitted)). Here, by contrast, Kozak’s claim of sexual harassment—about which Judge McCarthy and this Court found material questions of fact that preclude summary judgment on the claim of a hostile work environment—is inextricably intertwined with the reason for her firing. And if the jury believes Kozak about what happened but discredits Bryan’s claims about the thoroughness of her investigation, it could reasonably conclude that Kozak was fired not because she falsely accused her supervisor but because she was a woman who accused her male boss of misconduct and sexual harassment.
Based on this, the court denied defendant’s motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s Title VII sex discrimination claim.