A longtime employee of an insurance company failed to show that his termination was the result of age discrimination or retaliation for expressing disagreement with the outcome of a sexual-harassment investigation, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. The company presented legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for the firing—improper cellphone use and the alleged theft of food from a company facility—and the employee failed to show that the employer’s asserted reasons were a pretext for discriminatory or retaliatory motivation. As to the retaliation claim, the court stressed that temporal proximity between an employee’s protected conduct and their termination is not enough by itself to prove pretext.
