Fiveash v. Delong

Syllabus

The plaintiff, a director of member services at the defendant C Co., sought to recover damages from various defendants for alleged gender discrimi- nation and retaliation in violation of a provision (§ 46a-60) of the Con- necticut Fair Employment Practices Act. A few years after the plaintiff was hired, several employees in her department resigned while she was the director, and a few of those employees expressed displeasure with working for her and voiced complaints about her during exit interviews. In response, the defendant D, the executive director of C Co., instructed B, the director of human resources of C Co., to conduct an investigation into the allegations, which resulted in the termination of the plaintiff's employment. The plaintiff then commenced an action against C Co. and a related entity and a separate action against D, B and the defendant T, the deputy director of C Co., with whom the plaintiff did not get along. The two actions were consolidated for the purposes of discovery, pretrial pleadings and trial. Subsequently, the defendants filed a motion for summary judgment in each case, arguing that there were no genuine issues of material fact that would permit an inference of gender discrimi- nation or, in the alternative, that her termination was a pretext for gender discrimination. The trial court granted the defendants' motion, and the plaintiff appealed to this court. Held that the trial court properly granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment in each case, as no reasonable jury could have concluded that the plaintiff's termination was motivated in whole or in part by gender discrimination: the plaintiff did not demonstrate the existence of a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the defendants' legitimate, nondiscriminatory justification for her discharge, namely, repeated charges of mismanagement of employees and failure to respect authority as detailed in the report of the investigation, was a pretext for unlawful discriminatio