Court dismisses Navy worker’s discrimination claims over vague complaint

From there, the trouble was clarity. The court twice asked her to lay out her claims: what happened, when, where, and on what discriminatory basis. Her amended filing arrived without a proper complaint, without numbered paragraphs, unsigned, and with 157 pages of exhibits. It referenced legal terms like “discrimination,” “wrongful termination,” “workers’ compensation retaliation,” “harassment,” “false allegations,” and “misrepresentations,” but the court found those references “assumptive, fragmentary, and uncontextualized.” 

That gap is the HR lesson. To keep a discrimination claim alive, the court explained, an employee must show she suffered an adverse action because of a protected status, something that changes the “terms, conditions, or privileges” of her job. As the court put it, “not everything that makes an employee unhappy is an actionable adverse action.” The filing never identified which protected group she belonged to. 

A failure-to-accommodate claim fared no better. The court listed its four parts: a disability recognized by statute, an employer on notice of it, the ability to do the job’s essential functions with help, and an employer that refused it. She raised “disability discrimination” and “reasonable accommodation” in passing but gave no facts, and never described her job. 

Her retaliation theory hit a similar wall. Such a claim needs protected activity, a materially adverse action, and a link between the two. The court noted she never said when she filed her EEO complaint, or that anyone in her chain of command knew about it. An employer, the court reasoned, “cannot retaliate against an employee for protected activity unless it knows” about it. 

The court also refused to build her case for her, declining to comb the exhibits for unpleaded claims.