Court Opinion

ID: 9493452
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:08:38.546771+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:51.136228
License: Public Domain

BOGGS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and, dissenting in part.
The court’s opinion correctly sets out the facts and the applicable law in this case. I concur in all of the opinion, except parts III and IV, concerning the plaintiffs retaliation claim under Ohio discrimination law and her claim for wrongful discharge as an Ohio public policy tort.
As the opinion well describes, Janice Courtney was subjected to reprehensible behavior by several of her co-workers. However, when these matters were brought to the attention of the proper management channels, very prompt action was taken, and no further harassment took place.
It is undisputed that friction arose between Courtney and Landair over a change in run assignment,1 but that change, in itself, is not considered by the court as an incident of unlawful retaliation. The crux of the matter is the company’s reaction to an 11-page handwritten letter Courtney sent to Blevins, the Indianapolis terminal manager, on January 12, 1997.
This was over a month after her effective complaint about her treatment, and also more than a month after effective action was taken and harassment ceased. It was also more than a week after she had been assured that she could retain her preferred run to Seattle, so long as that business was available to the company. The company in no way encouraged, demanded, or stimulated the sending of the letter.
The letter can certainly be characterized as hostile and upsetting. In addition to the language quoted by the court, it also contains six pages of detailed complaints about her woes with particular FedEx loads over the holiday period and her anger at not being given a particular Coca-Cola load on January 3. This is followed by two pages of general grievances about management’s style, (noting that she is *568“going to seek help from a therapist” and that “right now I’m not really happy with you all”) before segueing into three pages of complaints about the previous sexual harassment (including that “my attitude towards my job and my personal life has gone in the toilet”) and concluding with the quoted threat. It then adds the notation that she lost all of her meat when she found the electricity and heat out and trees felled at her house when she returned from the holiday run.
The question for our determination, and the question on which I part company with my colleagues, is whether there is sufficient evidence to convince a reasonable jury that Landair’s reaction to this letter was simply a pretext for discrimination. Even if the company’s action was ill-advised, or overly cautious, it cannot be subjected to a trial on this issue unless there is adequate evidence of pretext.
Consider the company’s options:
— It could destroy Courtney’s letter and consider the matters resolved, as indeed they appear to have been. This would have been very ill-advised. The company was certainly correct in believing that if she were in an accident and testified that she sent such a letter, it could have caused catastrophic liability for the company.
— It could ignore the letter, but keep it in the file. This would be almost as bad for the company. It may be a sad fact of life, but if she were to be in an accident, however blamelessly, the letter would be discoverable, and there would a very good chance that some other court would allow it to be shown to a jury as evidence of gross negligence, willful and wanton activity, recklessness, or other principles that can lead to enormous punitive damages.
— It could have investigated further'— apparently the court’s preferred option, and apparently the only way Landair could have perhaps avoided having this claim go to jury. But what end would such an investigation actually have served?
1) If Courtney had reacted as she now says in her affidavit (18 months after the fact), the court apparently thinks the company might have (or should have) kept her. Now, matters are twice as bad from a liability standpoint, because it can be said that the company knew Courtney’s attitude was sufficiently dangerous that it should investigate — “and they still did nothing.” Any tort lawyer would love to have such a company action in her trial binder.
2) Alternatively, after hearing Courtney’s explanations, (which might or might not have been as anodyne as her affidavit suggests) the company might still have fired her. But now they’ve heard her side and still fired her, so their prospects of defeating a discrimination or retaliation claim may now be even bleaker.
The trucking company may not have been the most sensitive employer in the country. Maybe in a world with a better tort system, a company would not feel obliged to take such a communication so seriously. But, what evidence is there that the company did not take seriously disturbed or threatening communications from any of its drivers? There is none. Or that the company action was in any way related to the previous harassment complaint, which the company handled exactly as we would hope a responsible employer would. Again, none other than the proximity in time. In my judgment, on this record, that cannot be enough. Otherwise, when an employee has made a complaint that has been handled satisfactorily, the company must thereafter treat any problem with that employee in a particularly tender fashion, lest a panel such as ours find that they must incur great expense and risk even greater liability for taking action when there is not the slightest evidence that they would not have taken the *569same action against any other employee who had written in the same vein.
I believe this result is not correct under our standard for evidence sufficient to defeat summary judgment by making a showing of a pretext, and I therefore respectfully DISSENT.

. There were apparently two sources of friction. Courtney's handwritten letter complains of not being given a "Coca-Cola” load on January 3, which would have filled in some time before the normal run back to Seattle would have begun on Sunday, January 5. Apparently this run, which was not a regular run for Courtney, was given to another driver who could use it to get home.
The controversy over the projected (and never implemented) change in the regular Columbus-Seattle run was apparently resolved almost immediately. Courtney admits in her deposition that she received a letter dated January 3 (even before the regular run back to Seattle would have started) confirming that she would retain that run as long as the business was available, in preference to a company proposal to have an owner-operator do the run rather than a company driver. Her handwritten letter a week later does not even refer to this matter directly. Her letter does indicate that she did begin the run on January 5, and paragraph 14 of her affidavit is to the same effect.