A male employee who was accused of sexual harassment by two female co-workers responded to their complaints by making counter-accusations of harassment against them. The employer ultimately concluded that the man had engaged in harassment and made untruthful complaints, and decided to terminate him. He sued, claiming he’d been treated differently than the women.

What happened. “Tim” worked in the College of Public Health (COPH) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Within 10 days during the summer of 2005, two COPH employees—“Emma” and “Tanya”—submitted harassment complaints against him to the vice chancellor for Human Services, “Horace.” Horace appointed two members of a group called the Resource Panel to investigate the complaints. Once Tim was notified of the complaints, he sent an e-mail to Horace in which he attached a sexual harassment complaint against Emma. A few weeks later, he made a similar complaint against Tanya.

The investigators interviewed Tim, Emma, Tanya, and eight other people listed in Tim’s complaints as potential witnesses. They found “the claims against [Tim] more believable than his response in defense of those claims,” and added that “if all the witnesses interviewed were telling the truth, and there was no reason not to believe them, [Tim] was untruthful and used his response to cloud the real issues of the investigation.” After reviewing the investigator’s findings, Horace sent a recommendation to the dean of the COPH that Tim receive a warning and be terminated upon any further offenses. The dean, however, decided to terminate Tim.

Tim filed a complaint in a federal district court, claiming retaliation and sex discrimination. Specifically, he claimed he was terminated for filing sexual harassment complaints. The district court found for UAMS. Tim appealed to the 8th Circuit, which covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

What the court said. The appeals court explained that the “critical inquiry in discrimination cases like this one is not whether the employee actually engaged in the conduct for which he was terminated, but whether the employer in good faith believed that the employee was guilty of the conduct justifying discharge.”

UAMS had a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for terminating Tim—that he had engaged in harassment and then filed untruthful complaints against the female complainants. Tim did not offer evidence to suggest that either the “final decisionmaker” (the dean) or the “principal recommender” (Horace) did not in good faith believe that he had committed harassment on several occasions and was untruthful to investigators. McCullough v. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, No. 08-1353 (2009).

Point to remember: The employee could not show that the decisionmakers had fired him for making his complaints.  And he likewise had no evidence that they did not believe that he had committed sexual harassment.