Retaliation claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); Vicarious liability; Prima facie case; Whether defendant-former employer established a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for plaintiff’s discharge; Pretext; Whether plaintiff was “singled out for adverse treatment”; Hubbell v FedEx SmartPost, Inc; Whether a biased supervisor’s motives could be imputed to the decisionmakers who fired plaintiff; Staub v Proctor Hosp; “Cat’s paw” liability; Proximate causation; Romans v Michigan Dep’t of Human Servs

In an amended opinion, the court again held that plaintiff-Gray established her prima facie ADA retaliation claim that a supervisor’s (defendant-Kyles) “stated reason for reporting her” for alleged timecard irregularities “was a pretext designed to mask retaliation.” Further, she supported her vicarious liability claim against defendant-former employer (State Farm) with “enough evidence to show that Kyle proximately caused her termination” even though he was not among those who made the decision to discharge her. In the amended opinion the majority further discussed in footnote 2 the dissent’s position that Gray had forfeited her “cat’s paw” claim. It also elaborated on its decision to send the vicarious liability issue to a jury, stating that it was not announcing “a bright-line rule that a supervisor’s true-but-selective report will always be the proximate cause of any subsequent adverse employment action.” Instead, it “simply echo[ed]” the Supreme Court’s holding in Staub that “a subsequent investigation that does nothing more than confirm a supervisor’s true-but-selective report is by itself insufficient to break the chain of proximate causation.” The court concluded that it could not answer, as a matter of law, the question “whether Gray’s termination based on” additional discrepancies cited by State Farm “was so ‘unrelated’ to Kyle’s original report and so ‘not foreseeable’ by him that no reasonable factfinder could find proximate causation.” It explained that given that his “report and Gray’s termination both related to Gray’s timekeeping entries, a reasonable jury could find that the former improperly influenced—and was a proximate cause of—the latter.” The court added that its decision in Romans supported rather than undermined its analysis. It again reversed and remanded.