Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, EMPLOYEE LEAVE—E.D. Pa.: PNC employee’s mass email deletion defeats FMLA retaliation claim, (Aug 17, 2026)

By Kathleen Kapusta, J.D.

The employee admitted she deleted her emails out of spite for her manager and in violation of company policy.

PNC Bank did not violate the FMLA when it fired a Trust Real Estate Advisor II 10 days after she requested FMLA leave, a federal district court in Pennsylvania ruled, finding her mass deletion of emails just days earlier was sufficient to break the causal chain between her leave request and her termination. Nor did PNC interfere with her rights under the FMLA, said the court, noting that her interference claim was fundamentally a retaliation claim and even if it were to consider the claim under the interference framework, the “FMLA does not confer an unfettered right to job restoration.” Accordingly, the court granted summary judgment against both claims (Johnson v. PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. dba PNC Bank, No. 24-5283 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 12, 2026)).

As a Trust Real Estate Advisor II, the employee worked with PNC’s fiduciary advisors to manage real estate properties in the mid-Atlantic that were held in trusts or estates. She was responsible for all aspects of property management as well as conducting annual inspections that required her to physically visit the properties, and to directly interact with clients and their relatives.

Complaints. In 2024, the employee’s manager received multiple complaints about her from both clients and coworkers accusing her of failing to timely pay bills, complete projects for certain properties, and communicate with clients and management. As a result, the manager issued the employee a verbal warning. Afterward, the employee called HR and accused the manager of retaliating against her for complaining about a racially insensitive remark by the mother of a beneficiary of a trust with a property she managed.

Speak with HR. The next week, the employee declined a scheduled meeting with her manager at the last minute. When the manager called her, the employee picked up, told her to “speak with HR,” and then hung up.

Deleted emails. At some point not long after that, the manager learned the employee had applied for FMLA leave. Consistent with her standard practice, she began transitioning the employee’s portfolio to other advisors while she was on leave. As part of this process, the manager logged into the employee’s work email account and discovered that all of her emails had been deleted. Had the IT department not been able to recover them, PNC asserted, the deletion would have crippled its ability to manage the 35-40 properties in her portfolio.

HR investigations. HR investigated both the employee’s complaint against her manager and the email deletion. As to her complaint, it found the manager issued her the verbal warning “solely because of the performance issues” and not from any retaliatory motive. During HR’s investigation into the email deletion incident, the employee admitted she “emptied [her] emails out” because she “wanted [her manager] to start from ground zero” and “to have to work for it” because “if [the manager] was unhappy with [her] work, there was no need to use [it].”

Termination. HR recommended firing the employee and her manager agreed that termination was appropriate because she had violated PNC’s policy against removing or destroying company property, including work emails. She was terminated 10 days after her FMLA leave request.

FMLA retaliation. Regarding the employee’s FMLA retaliation claim, the parties disputed only the causation element of her prima facie case. According to the employee, the10 days between her leave request and her termination were sufficient to establish a causal connection. While the Third Circuit is “reluctant to infer a causal connection based on temporal proximity alone,” the court here noted that “courts have found that various periods—from a few days, to a week, to a few months—between the protected activity and adverse employment action may be ‘unusually suggestive’ enough to establish causation at summary judgment.”

Intervening event. Declining to determine whether the 10 days here was “unduly suggestive” enough to establish causation, the court instead explained that the employee’s mass deletion of emails broke the causal chain. “Courts in the Third Circuit,” it observed, “routinely decline to infer a causal connection where there was an ‘intervening event’—typically misconduct by the plaintiff—between the protected activity and the adverse employment action.”

Here, it was undisputed that two days after she requested FMLA leave, the employee deleted her emails in violation of company policy. This misconduct, said the court, was an intervening event that negated any inference of causation that could be drawn from the temporal proximity between her taking of FMLA leave and her termination. Thus, summary judgment was appropriate as to this claim.

FMLA interference. As to her interference claim, the employee argued that she was denied benefits under the FMLA because she was terminated, which “interfered with her right to take job protected leave and to return to her position.” Here, the court pointed out that it is “well-settled that where a plaintiff’s interference claim is based on an allegation that the employer took an adverse action because the plaintiff requested FMLA leave, the interference claim ‘is, in essence, identical to her retaliation claim.’”

Explaining that an FMLA retaliation claim is subject to the McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting framework, but an interference claim is not, the court noted that the employee could not “escape the McDonnell-Douglas analysis... merely by affixing an ‘interference’ label to one of [her] duplicative claims.”

And even if it were to consider her claim under the interference framework, there was no evidence she was not granted the FMLA leave she requested. Indeed, said the court, she was already on FMLA leave when she deleted the emails.

To the extent she claimed her termination interfered with her right to reinstatement, the “FMLA does not confer an unfettered right to job restoration” and she admitted she deleted her emails out of spite for her manager and in violation of company policy. “She has no right to reinstatement under the FMLA,” said the court, granting summary judgment against this claim as well.

The case is No. 24-5283.

Judge: Costello, M.

Attorneys: David M. Koller (Koller Law) for Breanna Johnson. Jacob Oslick (Seyfarth Shaw) for The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. dba PNC Bank.

Companies: The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.; PNC Bank

Cases: EmployeeLeave Discharge Retaliation PennsylvaniaNews