Smahi v. STMicroelectronics

Background

Rachid Smahi sued STMicroelectronics, Inc., Giorgio Pedrazzini, Ismail Allalcha, Frankie Agius, and Does 1 through 50. The opinion describes the case as an employment discrimination and retaliation action involving 14 causes of action under state and federal law. The claims included retaliation, disability discrimination, failure to reasonably accommodate a disability, failure to engage in the interactive process, harassment, wrongful discharge, assault and battery, and failure to pay wages.

Smahi worked for ST from October 2021 until his termination in June 2023. He began working remotely from Portland, Oregon, although his position was based at ST’s Santa Clara, California office. ST later required employees to return to the office, subject to approved hybrid-work exceptions. Smahi’s hybrid-work request was not approved. After a final warning made him ineligible for hybrid work, he did not comply with the company’s in-person work requirements, and ST terminated him on June 29, 2023, stating that he had failed to follow the policy.

Smahi also alleged that Agius harassed him, pressured him to fire older employees, and physically grabbed and shook him during two incidents in October 2022. He claimed that he complained about discriminatory conduct and was later retaliated against by managers. The defendants disputed parts of his account and moved for summary judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56, which permits judgment without a trial when there is no genuine dispute about a material fact and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Summary-Judgment Rulings

The court granted the ST defendants’ motion as to Smahi’s disability-discrimination, failure-to-accommodate, interactive-process, and harassment claims, and otherwise denied the motion in the body of the opinion. On the disability claims, the court concluded that the evidence did not support finding that Smahi had a qualifying disability or that ST knew of such a disability. The court stated that his medical episodes and temporary absences did not show a continuing substantial limitation on his ability to work, and that his statements about reducing stress were too vague to establish that ST knew of a lasting disability.

The court denied summary judgment on the retaliation claims. It found that Smahi presented evidence from which a jury could find that he engaged in protected activity by complaining about alleged age and disability discrimination, that he was terminated, and that his complaints contributed to his termination. Although ST identified failure to follow its in-office policy as the reason for termination, the court found sufficient circumstantial evidence for a jury to decide whether that reason was a pretext, meaning a false explanation masking retaliation.

The court granted summary judgment on the harassment claims. Smahi’s remaining theory was that he was harassed because he advocated for employees in protected classes and because he reported Agius. The court concluded that, although this evidence might support a retaliation claim, Smahi did not show that the alleged harassment was based on his membership in, or association with, a protected class.

The court denied summary judgment on Smahi’s assault-and-battery claim against the ST defendants. Viewing the evidence in Smahi’s favor, it concluded that a reasonable jury could find that Agius intended to injure him during the alleged grabbing and shaking incidents, particularly because Smahi said Agius expressed hatred and shook him until he feared Agius would hit him. The court also denied Agius’s separate motion on assault and battery because his version of the interactions presented disputed factual issues. It granted Agius’s motion on the harassment claim.

Sanctions for Destroyed Electronic Evidence

The court addressed ST’s renewed request for sanctions based on the destruction of electronically stored information. Under Rule 37(e), sanctions may apply when a party fails to take reasonable steps to preserve electronic information that should have been preserved for litigation and that cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery. The most serious sanctions require an intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.

After an evidentiary hearing, the court found that Smahi’s testimony about why he erased or reset his devices and deleted accounts was not credible. The court noted that he restored his iPhone, deleted an iCloud account and a Gmail account, and wiped his iMac the night before a scheduled forensic examination. Based on the timing, the deliberate nature of the conduct, and the court’s credibility finding, the court concluded that Smahi acted with the intent to deprive ST of the electronic information’s use in the litigation.

The court found prejudice to ST’s ability to pursue its counterclaims concerning alleged confidential information, but not enough prejudice to justify terminating sanctions. It therefore imposed an adverse-inference sanction: jurors may be instructed that the destroyed evidence would have been harmful to Smahi. The court declined to impose additional monetary sanctions.

Disposition

The conclusion states that the ST defendants’ summary-judgment motion was granted as to Counts III, IV, V, VIII, X, XI, XII, and XIV and otherwise denied. It states that Agius’s motion was granted as to Count V and denied as to Count VII. ST’s sanctions motion was granted in part. The opinion’s discussion describes the retaliation claims as surviving summary judgment, while the conclusion lists Count XII among the counts granted; the supplied text does not resolve that apparent inconsistency.