Opinion ID: 73281
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: was clover’s conduct protected under the

Text: OPPOSITION CLAUSE? Clover contends that the statements she made in her meeting with Hollingsworth and Calhoun constituted opposition to an unlawful employment practice, namely, sexual harassment. At the meeting, Clover says, she described acts that she believed to have been inappropriate or unusual behavior for a member of senior management [i.e., Pettis.] 7 Specifically, she testified that she told Hollingsworth and Calhoun that Pettis engaged in the following conduct: (i) Pettis made frequent visits without any business purpose to Waters' work area. (ii) Pettis would call Waters on her personal beeper during work hours. (iii) Pettis would sometimes knock on the department door where Waters, Clover and other employees worked to get Waters' attention and to call Waters out into the hall to talk. However, if Clover or another worker looked up, Pettis would dart behind the door out of sight.” (iv) Pettis hung up the phone on anybody who answered other than Waters during the day.” (v) Waters responded to the attention of Pettis in a flirting kind of style.” Clover claims that this testimony constitutes opposition to an unlawful employment practice. The parties agree that an employee who seeks protection under the opposition clause must have a good faith, reasonable belief that her employer has engaged in unlawful discrimination. See Little v. United Technologies, Carrier Transicold Div., 103 F.3d 956, 960 (11th Cir. 1997). 8 TSYS concedes that Clover had a good faith belief that TSYS engaged in unlawful sexual harassment because she sincerely believed that, but TSYS argues that her belief was not objectively reasonable. We agree. The objective reasonableness of an employee’s belief that her employer has engaged in an unlawful employment practice must be measured against existing substantive law. See Harper v. Blockbuster Entertainment Corp., 139 F.3d 1385, 1388 n.2 (11th Cir. 1998) (failure to charge the employee who opposes an employment practice with substantive knowledge of the law “would eviscerate the objective component of our reasonableness inquiry.). To establish a hostile environment claim premised on sexual harassment, a plaintiff must establish, among other things, that “the harassment occurred because of her sex, and that “the harassment was sufficiently severe or pervasive to affect a term, condition, or privilege of her employment. Huddleston v. Roger Dean Chevrolet, 845 F.2d 900, 904 (11th Cir. 1993). Clover contends that her belief that Pettis engaged in sexual harassment attributable to TSYS was objectively reasonable based 9 on the nature of [Pettis'] conduct in connection with [Waters,] a seventeen year old high school student combined with Pettis' position in the company [as an assistant vice-president.] However, the mere disparity between Pettis’ and Waters’ ages and positions in the company does not make Clover’s belief objectively reasonable. None of the conduct that Clover described comes anywhere near constituting sexual harassment, regardless of the relative positions of the employees involved. As the Supreme Court recently stated: [T]he statute does not reach genuine but innocuous differences in the ways men and women routinely interact with members of the opposite sex. The prohibition of harassment on the basis of sex requires neither asexuality nor androgyny in the workplace; it forbids only behavior so objectively offensive as to alter the “conditions” of the victim’s employment. Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 118 S. Ct. 998, 1002-03 (1998). The Supreme Court has said that the conduct in question must be severe or pervasive enough that a reasonable person would find it hostile 10 or abusive. That requirement is crucial to ensuring that courts and juries do not mistake ordinary socializing in the workplace, including intersexual flirtation, for discriminatory “conditions of employment.” See id. at 1003. We do not mean to hold that the conduct opposed must actually be sexual harassment, but it must be close enough to support an objectively reasonable belief that it is. The conduct Clover described misses the mark by a country mile. It follows that Clover’s belief that the conduct created a sexually hostile environment for Waters was not objectively reasonable. Nor did Clover relate any facts at all showing that Pettis, or anyone else, had subjected Waters to quid pro quo sexual harassment. Although dissenting only from our participation clause holding, Judge Henderson’s separate opinion also expresses some concerns about our opposition clause holding. In expressing those concerns, he states that “the conduct in question” was “sufficiently disturbing to lead Ms. Waters to file an EEOC complaint based on it and for the company to initiate an inhouse investigation involving outside legal counsel.” To begin with, the company’s in-house investigation, which began before Clover was 11 interviewed, was not based on anything Clover said but instead was a response to the EEOC complaint Ms. Waters had filed. Moreover, the quoted statement of concern from the dissenting opinion confuses the conduct Clover opposed, i.e., what she saw or heard and then reported during the in-house interview, with the actual conduct Ms. Waters experienced and reported in her complaint to the EEOC. There is nothing in the record to suggest that the two are the same. For opposition clause purposes, “the conduct in question” does not include conduct that actually occurred – or that was averred in an EEOC complaint by the alleged victim – but was unknown to the person claiming protection under the clause. Instead, what counts is only the conduct that person opposed, which cannot be more than what she was aware of. Additional conduct or allegations unknown to the opposing person are not relevant to the opposition clause inquiry. Clover’s belief that the conduct she described created a sexually hostile environment was objectively unreasonable, therefore, she did not engage in statutorily protected activity under the opposition clause. 12