Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, RETALIATION—N.D.N.Y.: Car salesman’s retaliation claims head to trial amid dispute over reason for his termination, (Sep 14, 2026)

By Nicholas Kaster, J.D.

The employee claimed he was fired for reporting a coworker’s sexual harassment by a manager.

While a car dealership salesman who was fired eight days after he reported the sexual harassment of a coworker, during a meeting regarding his compensation, and the day after he left work to meet with a competing dealership, established a prima facie case of retaliation. However, because neither party could establish pretext, a federal court in New York denied both parties’ motions for summary judgment on his Title VII and state-law claims (Horn v. G & H Auto Group, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-01457 (AMN/PJE) (N.D.N.Y. Sept. 10, 2026)).

Never bring it up again. From August 2022 until January 2023, the employee worked for a car dealership as a salesperson. He was terminated at the end of that period, eight days after he reported that a coworker had been sexually harassed by a manager. During those eight days, the employee claimed, the same managers to whom he reported the allegations told him to “never bring it up again,” and the co-owner of the dealership asked him why he had “brought up” the “thing” involving the allegedly harassed coworker before personally terminating him the next day.

The sexual harassment allegations were raised for the first time on January 2, 2023, during a meeting regarding the employee’s compensation. On January 9, 2023, the day before his termination, the employee reported that a manager reprimanded him for reporting the sexual harassment. Also on that same day, the employee left work for several hours and met with the general manager of a competing automobile dealership who had been trying to recruit him for years and who knew that the employee was unhappy with his compensation.

The employee brought suit against the employer, asserting an employment retaliation claim under Title VII and the New York State Human Rights Law (NYSHRL). Both parties moved for summary judgment.

Protected activity and employer awareness. The employer did not dispute that the manager’s alleged treatment of the coworker constituted sexual harassment creating a hostile work environment, nor did it dispute that the employee’s complaint made the employer aware of that activity. Instead, the employer argued that the employee’s opposition to the sexual harassment did not come from a “good faith, reasonable belief that the underlying challenged actions of the employer violated the law.”

The employer principally contended that the circumstances indicated that the employee raised the allegations only for his own benefit, and accordingly his conduct was not statutorily protected. According to the employer, the employee strategically delayed reporting the harassment allegations until the January 2, 2023, meeting regarding his compensation.

Good faith belief. This argument failed because it misapprehended retaliation law, the court stated. The employer contended that the employee’s motivations for notifying his supervisors of the sexual harassment allegations stripped his opposition to unlawful conduct of protection. But typically, if an employee has a “good faith, reasonable belief” that an employer action is unlawful under Title VII and the NYSHRL and they oppose it, they are protected from retaliation under both even if the underlying employer action is, in fact, lawful.

Where the good faith reasonable belief requirements are satisfied, an employment practice need not actually violate Title VII for the protected activities element of a retaliation claim to be satisfied. The employer here took a test meant to expand retaliation protection to employees who mistakenly oppose a lawful employer practice and asked the court to use it to withdraw protection from an employee who opposed an unlawful practice. What animates the “good faith, reasonable belief” test is not a requirement that every report of sexual harassment arise from motives that are above reproach, said the court, but instead an interest in stopping employees from extracting employment concessions on account of minor social lapses or harmless infractions in the workplace, or even escaping appropriate disciplinary measures.

Accordingly, what courts assess is not whether a plaintiff was motivated by some abstract “good faith” in making their complaint, but rather whether the plaintiff believed in good faith that “the conduct he opposed ran afoul of one of Title VII’s or the NYSHRL’s particular statutory proscriptions.”

In this case, the employee learned that his coworker had alleged that she was subject to inappropriate contact and harassing text messages by her manager, he reported it to the general manager and general sales manager, and then he gave an interview about it to the director of human resources. The employer did not argue that the employee had inadequate knowledge of the sexual harassment, that he could not have reasonably believed it was prohibited by Title VII or the NYSHRL, or that the underlying sexual harassment was not gender discrimination prohibited by statute. Accordingly, the court declined to hold that the employee’s activities were not protected activity under Title VII and the NYSHRL.

Causal connection. Here, only eight days separated the employee’s sexual harassment report and his termination, the court observed. This close temporal proximity alone was well within the bounds of what the Second Circuit has said provides strong circumstantial evidence of a causal relationship between the two events.

However, the employer rightly noted that where “timing is the only basis for a claim of retaliation, and gradual adverse job actions began well before the plaintiff had ever engaged in any protected activity, an inference of retaliation does not arise.” Accordingly, the employer contended that, because the record contained evidence of performance deficiencies by the employee predating his sexual harassment report—related to his client and social media outreach and his logging of customer contacts—he failed to show causation.

But two disputed issues of fact prevented the employer from prevailing on this argument. First, a reasonable factfinder could doubt the employer’s thin record on performance deficiencies and discipline. While the employer presented testimony that the employee was subject to “corrective conversations” by his managers to address performance issues, it did not support that testimony with contemporaneous documentation of reprimands, training, or discipline.

Second, a reasonable factfinder could find that statements and actions by the managers provided direct evidence of causation supplementing the circumstantial evidence of temporal proximity. For example, statements by the managers indicated that they responded to the sexual harassment report by calling the employee a “f*****g liar,” and assumed that he had used the sexual harassment complaint as a “f**k you” to management. And in the days after reporting the sexual harassment, the employee was told to stop talking about it.

A reasonable factfinder could conclude that some or all of this evidence suggested that the manager’s held sufficient animus against the employee for reporting the sexual harassment to terminate his employment. Accordingly, the court declined to grant summary judgment on prima facie causation.

Legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason. The Second Circuit has observed that ordinarily plaintiff’s evidence establishing a prima facie case and defendant’s production of a nondiscriminatory reason for the employment action raise a question of fact to be resolved by the factfinder after a trial. The court concluded that this was the case here. After accounting for disputed issues of material fact and viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to each party in turn, the court declined to grant summary judgment for either.

First, the employer contended that it articulated a legitimate and nonretaliatory reason that it terminated the employee, which the employee failed to rebut. The employer offered several potentially legitimate and nondiscriminatory reasons. The most well supported was the matter of the employee’s compensation that precipitated the meeting where he reported the sexual harassment allegation. One month before his termination, the employer ended a compensation arrangement that made the employee the best paid salesman at the dealership. The employee viewed this change in his compensation as violating the terms of his employment, and he raised the issue to management. The employer viewed the employee’s harassment allegations as a “trump card” that he used to redirect attention from a negotiation that was not going his way.

Just a week later—the day before he was fired—he left work in the middle of the day and met with the general manager of a rival automobile dealership that had been attempting to recruit him. But while the compensation dispute was a legitimate and nonretaliatory reason for the employee’s termination, the employer could not win summary judgment on it—or any other legitimate and nonretaliatory reason—in part because it failed to provide admissible evidence going directly to the exact reason the employee was terminated.

A plaintiff may challenge a legitimate reason as pretextual by “demonstrating weaknesses, implausibilities, inconsistencies, or contradictions in the employer’s proffered legitimate, nonretaliatory reasons for its action.” Here, there were readily apparent weaknesses and implausibilities, including evidence potentially undermining the compensation dispute justification. The court thus concluded that the disputed issues of fact prevented summary judgment for the employer.

However, this did not mean that the employee’s motion, as much as it pointed out many of these weaknesses and implausibilities, required summary judgment. An employee’s prima facie case, combined with sufficient evidence to find that the employer’s asserted justification is false, may permit the trier of fact to conclude that the employer unlawfully discriminated, but it does not compel judgment for the employee, said the court. And the employer was correct that temporal proximity alone could not create an issue of fact on pretext at the summary judgment stage. To prevail on pretext, the employee had to rely on disputed issues of fact, such as the alleged statement by the employer’s co-owner the day before the employee’s termination expressing disappointment in his decision to make a sexual harassment complaint. Those issues of fact are all properly decided by a jury, the court said, and therefore it declined to grant summary judgment to the employee.

The case is No. 1:24-cv-01457 (AMN/PJE).

Judge: Nardacci, A.

Attorneys: Kelly A. Magnuson (Harding Mazzotti) for Christopher Horn. John W. Liguori (The Towne Law Firm) for G&H Auto Group, Inc. dba Mohawk Chevrolet.

Companies: G&H Auto Group, Inc.; Mohawk Chevrolet

Cases: Retaliation SexualHarassment Discharge NewYorkNews