Title VII; Retaliation against an employee for opposing an employer’s discriminatory practices; 42 USC § 2000e-3(a); Protected activity; Engaging in both protected & unprotected activity; Emergency medical technician (EMT)

Holding that Title VII does not protect an employee who “needlessly and gratuitously shared nude and possibly sexually explicit images of co-workers” at work, the court affirmed summary judgment for defendant-former employer. Plaintiff-Crisp alleged that a co-worker (G) “groped her and tried to stuff her into a trash can while on the job.” Her complaint to a supervisor resulted in a requirement that the two never work the same shift again. Years later, after she recalled “there were allegedly pornographic images of” G and his wife online, Crisp, while at work, “showed those images to several EMTs.” Defendant fired her for doing so. The court noted that it could “envision scenarios where sharing such material might be necessary or warranted to substantiate a claim of sexual harassment, but this is not one of them.” If G behaved as Crisp alleged, such “conduct was deplorable and sanctionable. . . . But that would not excuse how Crisp responded. Instead of seeking redress in a lawful way, Crisp took matters two steps further by showing nude and perhaps also sexually explicit images of both [G] and his wife (who had nothing to do with [G’s] alleged workplace misconduct) to other co-workers while at work. Crisp did not need to share those images to make her point, nor can she justify showing the images of” G’s wife. The court noted that even if the Gs “posted these images online and publicly shared some of this information, that does not mean that their co-workers had to be subjected to seeing or hearing about it while on the job. In the workplace, the law requires that some things be left unseen.” These alleged “profiles are two of them.” The court noted that when “an employee engages in both protected and unprotected conduct under Title VII, she cannot use the protected conduct to seek shelter from a firing that is based on her unprotected conduct.” The fact that Crisp was complaining about G’s behavior to two co-workers “did not give her the right to also show the nude and possibly sexually explicit pictures of him and his wife.” That it may have been permissible for her to tell her co-workers about G’s “alleged workplace misconduct does not excuse her own misconduct.”