Opinion ID: 3011207
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fact Finding in the District Court

Text: In order to reject a district court's findings of fact, the reviewing court, after examining all the evidence, must be left with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed. When there are two permissible views of the evidence, the district court's choice between them cannot be clearly erroneous. See Ezold v. Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, 983 F.2d 509, 525 (3d Cir. 1992). 9 Much of Evans's case against Durham comes down to a credibility contest. Evans says that certain incidents occurred and that Durham's managers had discriminatory motives. Durham disputes those claims, and argues, even on appeal, that Evans's factual position is so weak as to be unsupportable. Since Title VII does not have a corroboration requirement, Durham's attempts to resurrect its factual claims on appeal are unavailing.2 Although testimony on Durham's side contradicts Evans's, her story is facially plausible, and the district judge credited it. We see no basis for finding clear error here. See Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 575 (1985) (when a district judge credits one of two opposed coherent and facially plausible stories and the story is not contradicted by extrinsic evidence, that finding, if not internally inconsistent, can virtually never be clear error). Durham complains that the District Court adopted Evans's proposed findings of fact with little alteration. Although we do not encourage verbatim adoption of proposed findings of fact, their review requires no greater scrutiny on appeal than other fact finding. See LansfordCoaldale Water Auth. v. Tonolli Corp., 4 F.3d 1209, 1215 (3d Cir. 1993). The District Court's discussion following its findings of fact demonstrated a keen familiarity with the record. Moreover, the court declined to adopt all of Evans's proposed findings, which shows that it was exercising independent judgment.3 _________________________________________________________________ 2. The McKaskill incident is an example. Evans testified that McKaskill grabbed her buttocks from behind. No one else witnessed it and she did not tell anyone about it until the lawsuit. Durham argues that she is therefore not credible. Durham repeats these arguments about many of the specific instances of harassment to which Evans testified. This strategem fails. Credibility determinations are for the finder of fact. See United States v. Bethancourt, 65 F.3d 1074, 1078 (3d Cir. 1995); Government of Virgin Islands v. Gereau, 502 F.2d 914, 921 (3d Cir. 1974). If the District Court found Evans a credible witness, it was perfectly correct to credit Evans's account even if she told no one at the time the harassment occurred. The only prompt complaint requirement in Title VII is the statute of limitations, and Evans's counterclaim was filed well within the statutory period. 3. Durham objects that some of the findings of fact contradict Evans's own testimony about the timeline of events. Evans was occasionally 10 Durham's main objection to the District Court'sfindings appears to be that the court aggregated numerous events to support its finding of a hostile work environment. Some of these events were apparently triggered by sexual desire, some were sexually hostile, some were non-sexual but gender-based, and others were facially neutral. Wefind no error, because Title VII may be applied to all of these types of conduct. Title VII prohibits sex discrimination. Althoughsex has several common meanings, in Title VII it describes a personal characteristic, like race or religion. We generally presume that sexual advances of the kind alleged in this case are sex-based, whether the motivation is desire or hatred. Likewise, hostile or paternalistic acts based on perceptions about womanhood or manhood are sex-based or gender-based. Gender has often been used to distinguish socially- or culturally-based differences between men and women from biologically-based sex differences, but we have not considered sex and gender to be distinct concepts for Title VII purposes. See Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 250-51 (1989) (plurality opinion) (holding that reliance on gendered stereotypes of appropriate female behavior is sex discrimination); cf. Sheridan v. E.I. Dupont De Nemours & Co., 100 F.3d 1061 (3d Cir. 1996) (en banc) (using sex and gender interchangeably), cert. denied, 117 S. Ct. 2532 (1997); Wilson v. Susquehanna Township _________________________________________________________________ confused about when exactly certain incidents occurred, but it was hardly unreasonable for the court to have selected one of the timelines she offered. Moreover, Durham offers no explanation of why it would matter whether one of her superiors made his pass in May rather than June, which is the most that Durham's argument can be said to prove. Arguably, the more distant in time the event was from Evans's resignation, the less plausible is her claim that discrimination led her to quit, but since she alleged a continuing, long-term series of harassing events not limited to sexual propositions, feuding over dates is unhelpful. See Hassine v. Jeffes, 846 F.2d 169, 172 n.1 (3d Cir. 1988) (adoption of defendant's proposed findings of fact that contained inconsistencies with defendant's earlier admissions was legitimate and did not so undermine the ultimate conclusion that the district court reached as to require reversal). 11 Police Dep't, 55 F.3d 126 (3d Cir. 1995) (characterizing a sexually hostile environment as evidence of gender bias). Therefore, we will treat the sexual misconduct and the gender-based mistreatment in this case as sex discrimination. The facially neutral mistreatment plus the overt sex discrimination, both sexual and non-sexual, in sum constituted the hostile work environment. See Aman v. Cort Furniture Rental Corp., 85 F.3d 1074, 1083 (3d Cir. 1996) (acts of harassment, if motivated by sex or race, can constitute a hostile work environment regardless of their content); Andrews v. City of Philadelphia, 895 F.2d 1469, 1485 (3d Cir. 1990) (overtly sexual harassment is unnecessary to establish a sexually hostile work environment; discriminatory treatment is the only requirement). As we stated in Andrews, the record must be evaluated as a whole when we consider whether Evans proved her case: Particularly in the discrimination area, it is often difficult to determine the motivations of an action and any analysis is filled with pitfalls and ambiguities. A play cannot be understood on the basis of some of its scenes but only on its entire performance, and similarly, a discrimination analysis must concentrate not on individual incidents, but on the overall scenario. Id. at 1484; see also Vicki Schultz, Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment, 107 Yale L.J. 1683 (1998) (arguing that non-sexual harassment is often a major part of a hostile work environment). In its appeal, Durham attempts to disaggregate the various allegedly discriminatory acts and endeavors to cast doubt on each one, arguing that the overtly sexual acts did not occur and that the non-sexual actions taken against Evans have innocent explanations. We conclude, however, that the District Court appropriately refused to consider each incident in a vacuum and that its findings are not clearly erroneous.