Mark Bergens, an assistant manager at a Diverse Concepts restaurant, suffered a stroke shortly after being promoted to general manager of a new location. While recovering, he was hired back at his original post. In October 2022, Bergens asked a co-worker to obtain moonshine. When the co-worker played a prank by hiding the moonshine in another manager's bag, Bergens searched the bags of two managers without permission to find it. Security footage showed Bergens opening the bags and sticking his hand inside. The managers were upset, and after Bergens initially denied the act when confronted, the company terminated him. Bergens sued, alleging the termination was pretextual discrimination based on his disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, arguing the company fired him because they feared he could not handle the new role after his stroke. The district court granted summary judgment for the employer, and Bergens appealed.
The court applied the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework to the ADA claim. While the parties agreed on the first two steps—establishing a prima facie case and the employer providing a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason—the case turned on whether Bergens could prove the employer's reason was pretext. The court analyzed three categories of pretext evidence. First, regarding the 'no basis in fact' argument, the court found the employer's reason had a factual basis in the video footage and the employee's initial denial, invoking the honest-belief rule which protects employers who reasonably believe their stated reason is true. Second, the court rejected comparator evidence because the other employees cited by Bergens were not similarly situated; they did not deal with the same supervisors, were not held to the same professional standards as a manager, or did not engage in substantially identical conduct involving a breach of trust. Third, the court dismissed other circumstantial evidence, including temporal proximity, which was dispelled by the intervening legitimate reason of the bag-searching incident. The court also found that remarks about Bergens's disability were ambiguous or not made by the decisionmaker in a way that proved pretext, and that the employer's failure to follow a progressive discipline policy was not a violation since the policy allowed for immediate termination. Collectively, the evidence was insufficient to create a genuine dispute that the termination was motivated by discrimination.
The decision reinforces the 'honest-belief rule' in employment discrimination cases, clarifying that employers are protected when they reasonably believe an employee's misconduct occurred, even if the employee claims it was a misunderstanding. It also sets a high bar for comparator evidence, requiring that comparators be similarly situated in all relevant respects, including supervisory relationships and the nature of the misconduct. The ruling affirms that an intervening legitimate reason for termination can dispel inferences of discrimination based on temporal proximity to a disability.
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