Springs v. United States Department of Treasury

567 F. App'x 438
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedJune 9, 2014
DocketNo. 13-1521
StatusPublished
Cited by21 cases

This text of 567 F. App'x 438 (Springs v. United States Department of Treasury) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Springs v. United States Department of Treasury, 567 F. App'x 438 (6th Cir. 2014).

Opinion

JULIA SMITH GIBBONS, Circuit Judge.

When Venus Springs applied for a job at Ally Financial, she omitted some pertinent information: Springs had been fired from her previous job at Mayer Brown, a global law firm that happened to be one of Ally’s largest providers of legal services. Ally hired Springs to assist its legal department with the selection and retention of outside law firms, and by Springs’s account, the relationship went well for about a year. Then relations quickly soured when Springs filed a workplace discrimination suit against Mayer Brown. Because Springs had not disclosed her adversarial relationship with Mayer Brown, Ally fired her. Springs fired back, this time accusing Ally of race discrimination and unlawful retaliation. The United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina rejected that accusation, concluding that Ally had a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for terminating Springs’s employment. The decision was affirmed on appeal. Now, two years after the North Carolina district court rejected her claims, Springs again seeks relief against Ally. And in this second incarnation of her suit against Ally, she has added several Ally employees as defendants, as well as the United States Department of the Treasury, which allegedly owned and controlled Ally. The United States District Court for [441]*441the Eastern District of Michigan dismissed Springs’s allegations and refused to permit her to amend her complaint to add new claims arising from the defendants’ alleged post-termination retaliation against her. We affirm.

I.

Springs joined the Charlotte, North Carolina, office of Mayer Brown as an attorney in July 2007.1 The union lasted less than one year, however, and in May 2008 the firm told Springs that it was terminating her employment. She was given ninety days to find another job. Two months later, she completed an application to join the Charlotte office of Ally-Financial as a strategic sourcing manager in the Global Procurement group — a job that would require Springs to assist Ally’s legal department in its selection of outside legal vendors. After conducting several interviews and a background check, Ally hired Springs in October 2008. According to Springs, she disclosed her prior employment with Mayer Brown on both her application for employment and her background check forms. But she did not disclose her termination.

Sometime after Ally hired Springs, she filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accusing Mayer Brown of race and sex discrimination. In May 2009, after the EEOC dismissed the charge and issued a right-to-sue notice, Springs filed suit in North Carolina state court against Mayer Brown and one of its partners. The defendants removed the case to the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.

The month after Springs filed her complaint, a story in The Charlotte Observer revealed the suit’s existence. As it turns out, Mayer Brown was one of Ally’s principal suppliers of legal services. Springs alleges that someone at Mayer Brown telephoned someone in Ally’s legal department to discuss Springs’s complaint. News of the complaint was passed to defendant William Solomon, Ally’s general counsel, and he discussed it with several other Ally employees, including defendants Amy Bou-que, Kathleen Patterson, Yeqiang He, Cynthia Dautrich, and Robert Neaton. That group collectively determined that “Springs had to be terminated,” she alleges, and they “brainstormed” to fabricate a basis on which to terminate her employment at Ally. She further alleges that the individual defendants decided to “increase the intimidation factor” because Springs was an attorney — itself an intimidation factor, we are to presume.

To that end, Springs alleges, she was instructed to meet with someone named Lee Blasingame on the night of June 30, 2009. She was not familiar with Blasin-game, a man of “intimidating size,” and she “packed her pepper spray and an audio recording device because she was anticipating a physical assault or some other absolutely devastating result.” The meeting took place “behind closed doors in a poorly lit room with no windows.” Blasin-game greeted her by saying, “How the hell are you?” before conferencing in Bouque, a human resources director, via telephone. Blasingame and Bouque questioned Springs about her discrimination suit and [442]*442explained how her acrimonious relationship with Mayer Brown gave rise to the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Ally subsequently terminated Springs for failure to disclose a conflict of interest during the interview process, and Springs filed an EEOC charge accusing Ally of discrimination. According to the complaint, Ally and several of its employees then began a campaign to harass and humiliate Springs. The defendants “act[ed] in concert to foreclose on her home, deny her COBRA insurance coverage[,] and provide false information to the EEOC.” The defendants also allegedly conspired with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “threaten [Springs’s] manner of life and freedom in retaliation for” her civil rights complaint.

The EEOC dismissed her charge in March 2010, and three months later Springs filed suit against Ally, Bouque, Patterson, He, and Dautrich in North Carolina state court. That complaint alleged race discrimination and retaliation in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and the laws of North Carolina. The defendants removed the case to the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, and the district court dismissed the claims against the individual defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction and awarded summary judgment to Ally. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed that decision in an August 2012 opinion. About six weeks before the North Carolina district court awarded summary judgment to Ally, Springs filed this strikingly similar case in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The factual allegations in this complaint largely mirror the allegations in the North Carolina suit, but Springs added new causes of action and named two new individuals and the United States Department of the Treasury as defendants. The complaint includes six counts: (1) wrongful termination and retaliation, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981; (2) purposeful discrimination under color of law, in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution;2 (8) deprivation without adequate notice of Springs’s protected property interest in continued employment, in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment; (4) civil conspiracy; (5) intentional infliction of emotional distress; and (6) tortious interference with Springs’s advantageous business relationship with Ally. Ally is excluded from counts one and six, and the Treasury Department is excluded from count six. After Springs twice amended the complaint, both the Ally defendants and the Treasury Department moved to dismiss. As those motions were pending, Springs sought leave to amend the complaint a third time to add a claim alleging post-termination retaliation. The district court denied that request and dismissed the suit. That brings us to the present.

II.

We first address the denial of Springs’s motion for leave to amend her complaint.

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567 F. App'x 438, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/springs-v-united-states-department-of-treasury-ca6-2014.