Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, EMPLOYEE LEAVE—D.R.I.: Employee terminated while in substance abuse recovery establishes FMLA interference claim, (May 7, 2026)

By Steven D. Cole, J.D.

Since the employee’s failure to submit his FMLA certification may not have been practicable under the circumstances, the university’s stated reason for the termination—job abandonment—may have violated the FMLA.

A former administrative assistant who worked for Brown University avoided summary judgment on his FMLA interference claim, though his FMLA retaliation and state-law failure to accommodate and retaliation claims could not proceed, after a decision by a federal district court in Rhode Island. The employee received approval to take time off to address mental health issues, but the FMLA certification that he sent to Brown never arrived because the employer had provided him with the wrong mailing address. After some back-and-forth email communication, followed by an extended period of unresponsiveness from the employee, Brown deemed the employee to have abandoned his job and terminated his employment. Whether the employee made good-faith efforts to supply the form and was protected by the applicable regulation’s “practicability exception” was a question best left to a jury. There was, however, no evidence that Brown acted in a discriminatory or retaliatory manner when it terminated his employment; to the contrary, it was supportive of his FMLA leave (Gomes v. Brown University, No. 23-cv-219-JJM-PAS (D.R.I. May 4, 2026)).

Leave requested. The employee began working at Brown as an administrative assistant in April 2019. In March 2021, he told his supervisor that he was struggling with some mental health issues and requested a leave of absence. He never disclosed to anyone at Brown that he was in recovery for substance abuse, had relapsed, and the leave was so that he could attend an intensive outpatient program at Butler Hospital (Butler).

Form mailed. On April 19, a Leave and Accommodation Specialist (LAS) at Brown emailed the employee to confirm his leave eligibility and asked that his doctor complete and return the attached FMLA certification via fax within 15 days. On April 23, the doctor filled out the form and gave it to the employee, since Butler would not fax such forms. The employee then emailed Brown’s Human Resources (HR) Director to request the proper mailing address for the form, and she responded with an address that the employee only later came to learn contained an incorrect zip code.

He mailed the form, but when Brown did not receive it by the May 4 deadline, a Benefits Specialist emailed the employee on May 6 to inform him of this. She provided him an additional seven days to send Brown the medical certification, otherwise his leave would not be designated as FMLA-protected.

Supervisor’s reminder. In a May 10 email, the supervisor reminded the employee that his FMLA certification was due in three days. The employee responded, informing his supervisor that he had mailed the form to Brown. He acknowledged that it has not been received and promised to complete the paperwork “as soon as possible.” He also told her that he expected to be out for another two or three weeks. The next day, the supervisor emailed the employee, stating that she had let the LAS know he was sending in the form and that she had extended his leave.

Note provided but not form. On May 12, the LAS emailed the employee to follow up, telling him that she still had not received the FMLA form. He did not respond, but emailed his supervisor the next day, attaching a note from his physician’s assistant stating that he was out of work for “medical reasons” and would likely be able to return to work on the week of June 1. The supervisor forwarded this note to the LAS. On May 17, the HR Director emailed the employee, stating that Brown had still not received his FMLA form, and offered to reach out to the doctor to resolve the paperwork issue. The employee did not respond.

Termination. A week later, Brown informed the employee via email that his leave was unapproved because it had not received a completed FMLA certification. Three days later, after receiving no response, Brown emailed him again to say that his employment would be terminated the next day for job abandonment if he did not respond in some way about his intentions. Brown did not terminate him the next day, but sent a final email on June 1 terminating him for job abandonment.

The employee filed suit against Brown, alleging interference and retaliation under the FMLA, and disability discrimination and retaliation under the Rhode Island Fair Employment Practices Act (RIFEPA) and the Rhode Island Civil Rights Act (RICRA). He later testified that he did not see any of the emails sent from May 17 through May 27, and that if he had, he would have responded and acted promptly. Brown moved for summary judgment on all claims.

FMLA interference. The employee contended that Brown’s decision to terminate his employment before he could send in a new FMLA form, after promising to do so as soon as possible, interfered with his FMLA rights. Brown argued that it was entitled to summary judgment on this claim because it was undisputed that the employee did not submit the statutorily-required FMLA certification form within the 15-day deadline, the expanded deadline that Brown allowed, or at all.

The employee, in support of his argument, relied on a regulation promulgated by the Department of Labor, which provides an exception to the 15-calendar-day rule for submitting the certification when “it is not practicable under the particular circumstances to do so despite the employee’s diligent, good faith efforts.” 29 C.F.R. § 825.305(b).

On the record, the court concluded that summary judgment in favor of Brown was inapposite because a jury could find that the employee acted in good faith in his attempts to provide his employer with the FMLA form by mailing it to the address that Brown had given him, and also that Brown should have further extended the deadline, as it had done before, “in the face the of [the employee]’s professed compliance and promise to mail another form as soon as possible while suffering with a medical condition requiring him to be out of work.”

Furthermore, it was reasonable for the employee to believe that he was out on approved leave as of May 11, given his supervisor’s email indicating that she had let the LAS know that his leave was being extended.

FMLA retaliation. The employee’s FMLA retaliation claim did not fare as well. Presuming that the employee set forth a prima facie case, Brown provided a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for its adverse employment decision—its belief that the employee had abandoned his job when he did not send in the proper FMLA paperwork and failed to respond to email communication for over two weeks after having responding promptly over the previous month. The employee produced no evidence from which a reasonable jury could conclude that Brown fired him because he had taken FMLA leave. To the contrary, all of the evidence indicated that Brown was supportive of his leave for mental health reasons.

The employee asserted that Brown’s communication process was “confusing and unfair” because it used his work email address while knowing that he had no access to a computer “while he was hospitalized,” as evidence of retaliation. It was not. Brown had been receiving regular responses from the employee when sending emails to his work address, and the employee did not inform Brown that he was hospitalized. And, in fact, he was never admitted to Butler for inpatient care; he received treatment on an outpatient basis.

RIFEPA and RICRA claims. The employee alleged violations of both Rhode Island statutes based on a failure to accommodate his disability. Fatal to these claims, though, were the uncontested facts that the employee did not couch his request for FMLA medical leave as a request for a reasonable accommodation and did not explain how such accommodation was linked to his disability. His communications with Brown only vaguely referenced his mental health struggles. “An employer cannot be faulted for failing to provide a reasonable accommodation for a serious medical condition when it does not know what it is being asked to accommodate.” Nor did the employee present any evidence that anyone at Brown possessed a discriminatory motive.

The state-law claims for retaliation failed under the same analysis provided for the FMLA retaliation claim. Ultimately, no reasonable jury could find a causal link between Brown’s decision to terminate his employment and his FMLA leave.

The case is No. 23-cv-219-JJM-PAS.

Judge: McConnell, Jr., J.

Attorneys: Maria Cedeno Cassinelli (ODU Law Firm) for John Gomes. Benjamin R. Davis (Jackson Lewis) for Brown University.

Companies: Brown University

Cases: EmployeeLeave Discharge StateLawClaims Retaliation RhodeIslandNews