Juan Dominguez, a security supervisor, was fired by Weiser Security Services in June 2020. Weiser cited performance issues, including failure to train officers on new COVID-19 temperature check protocols and failure to wear a mask. Dominguez sued, alleging the termination was retaliation for a report he made to Human Resources about his supervisor, Joseph Yates, allegedly giving preferential treatment to female employees. The district court granted summary judgment for Weiser, finding Dominguez could not prove that Mike Strickland, the branch manager who made the termination decision, knew about Dominguez's report. Dominguez appealed, arguing that Strickland should be held liable either because he knew of the report or because Yates, who allegedly knew, manipulated Strickland into firing him.
The Tenth Circuit analyzed the case under the McDonnell Douglas framework, focusing strictly on the causation element required for a Title VII retaliation claim. The court explained that to prove causation, a plaintiff must show either that the decisionmaker knew of the protected activity or that a biased actor used the decisionmaker as a cat's paw. In this case, the court found that Dominguez failed to provide evidence that Strickland, the ultimate decisionmaker, knew of Dominguez's report to Human Resources regarding sex discrimination. The record showed that the Human Resources investigator did not inform Strickland of Dominguez's specific comments, and Dominguez offered no evidence that anyone else relayed that information. The court rejected Dominguez's argument that Strickland should be presumed to have known simply because Dominguez was interviewed in an unrelated race discrimination investigation, calling such an inference mere speculation. Regarding the cat's paw theory, the court held that liability cannot attach if the biased supervisor, Yates, did not know of the protected activity. The court examined Dominguez's evidence that Yates knew, including a prior conversation about job security and an angry phone call, but found these insufficient to prove Yates knew Dominguez had reported him for sex discrimination on the specific date in question. The court noted that without proof that Yates knew of the protected activity, his actions could not be motivated by retaliatory animus, regardless of whether his reasons for firing Dominguez were pretextual. As the opinion states, 'Dominguez has done neither' regarding the knowledge requirement, and 'bare speculation' about knowledge is not enough to overcome summary judgment.
The decision affirms the dismissal of the lawsuit, leaving the summary judgment in place. It reinforces the strict evidentiary burden on plaintiffs in retaliation cases to prove that the specific decisionmaker or the biased actor actually knew of the protected activity. Employers are protected from liability when they can demonstrate that the final decisionmaker was unaware of the employee's protected conduct, even if a lower-level supervisor harbored animus. The ruling clarifies that pretext evidence alone cannot establish causation if the fundamental link of knowledge between the protected activity and the decisionmaker is missing.
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