Dr. Stella Safo v. Dr. Prabhjot Singh

Background

Plaintiffs are current and former employees of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, which is part of the Icahn School of Medicine of Defendant Mount Sinai Health System, Inc. Plaintiffs’ surviving claims include gender-based discrimination, retaliation, and equal-pay violations. The motion concerned the scope of depositions, not the ultimate merits of those claims.

Defendants sought a protective order, which is a court order limiting discovery to prevent undue burden, embarrassment, oppression, or annoyance. They asked to bar questions about 14 topics. Plaintiffs argued that the topics were relevant and discoverable.

Court’s Analysis and Rulings

The court applied the broad standard for discovery relevance and placed the burden on Defendants to show good cause for limiting discovery.

- Topic 1: The court denied the protective-order request. Allegations that Dr. Charney screamed at a former student could bear on whether Plaintiffs experienced a gender-based hostile work environment or whether employees of all genders faced equally harsh conditions. - Topic 2: The court denied the request. Allegations that Dr. Charney failed to disclose financial ties to a treatment manufacturer could be relevant to why Dr. Singh was hired instead of a more senior woman. - Topic 3: The court denied the request. Allegations that Dr. Singh was underqualified and inflated his curriculum vitae could bear on whether Dr. Charney acted with discriminatory intent against women. - Topic 4: The court denied the request for the same reasons given for Topic 3. The allegations concerned Dr. Singh’s alleged misrepresentation of funding sources. - Topics 5, 6, and 12: The court denied the request. Plaintiffs articulated possible relevance based on their contention that Dr. Singh mismanaged funds, cited budget constraints to sideline women and their projects, and spent money on other activities. The court found that Defendants had not shown good cause to restrict these questions. - Topic 7: The court granted the request. The topic concerned alleged shortcomings and concealment involving Project ATLAS. The court found the project information at most minimally relevant and found that Defendants had shown credible burdens involving data privacy and voluminous documents. Plaintiffs could still ask about discriminatory conduct occurring during the project without asking about the project or its management. - Topics 8, 9, and 10: The court granted the request. These topics concerned alleged ethical and health-information-privacy issues related to Project ATLAS, a former plaintiff’s work on the project, and that former plaintiff’s alleged whistleblowing and departure. The court found no demonstrated connection between those subjects and gender discrimination and found that the burdens outweighed the benefits. - Topic 11: The court granted the request. The topic concerned alleged retaliation against a former plaintiff. The court found that the former plaintiff’s retaliation and hostile-work-environment claims had previously been dismissed and that the allegations involved different circumstances and motivations from the remaining retaliation claims. - Topic 13: The court granted the request. The topic concerned alleged edits by Defendant Bruno Silva to a document after the lawsuit began. The court found no connection between those edits and the substance of Plaintiffs’ discrimination claims and noted that Plaintiffs did not allege that Silva falsely presented the document as its published version or concealed the later edits. - Topic 14: The discussion states that the protective-order request concerning “Topic 13” was denied, even though the section concerns letters of support. The court found that the letters could contain relevant information and that Defendants had requested discovery about them. The order’s conclusion states that the request was granted for Topics 7 through 11 and 13 and denied for the remaining topics, which indicates that the request concerning Topic 14 was denied.

Disposition

The court granted in part Defendants’ protective-order motion. In its concluding paragraph, the court stated that the request to prevent deposition questions about Topics 7 through 11 and 13 was granted, and that the request concerning the remaining topics was denied. The Clerk was directed to close the motion at Dkt. No. 138. The court also stated that the parties were not required to attend mediation if they did not believe mediation would be productive and instructed them to notify the mediation office promptly if they declined to participate at that time.