Reynolds v. Fraser

Ms. Reynolds was fired from her job at the NYC Department of Correction (“Department”) for violating its sick leave policy. Ms. Reynolds was a victim of domestic violence. In 2002, she requested vacation time to find a home after leaving her abuser. When she did not find a home within her given vacation time, she requested more time off to continue searching for a place to live. As a result of her request, her employer put her on immediate sick leave and demanded that she provide them with an address. When Ms. Reynolds told them she was currently homeless, she was told she could not work at the Department without providing them with a current address. Faced with the threat of termination, even after she explained her homelessness, she gave her husband’s address. It was the Department’s policy to police sick leave abuse by sending monitors to a sick employee’s home for surprise visits. When a monitor appeared at Ms. Reynolds’s husband’s home to check in on her, she was not present. Ms. Reynolds was fired as a result. She brought suit against her employer for violating the law prohibiting employers from discriminating against victims of domestic violence. In 2001 New York enacted an amendment to the City’s Human Rights Law, also known as the Local Law I (the “Law”), to prevent employers from discriminating against victims of domestic violence. The stated purpose of this amendment was “to protect the economic viability of victims of domestic violence and to support their efforts to gain independence from their abusers by enabling victims of domestic violence to speak with their employers without fear of reprisal, about domestic violence incidents or about possible steps that will enhance their ability to perform their job without causing undue hardship.” The Supreme Court, New York County (a New York State trial court) found that the Department violated the Law when it did not make reasonable accommodations for Ms. Reynolds’s status as a homeless victim of domestic violence. The court reasoned, “the end result here, [Ms. Reynolds’s] loss of a job at the point when she was finally getting her living situation under control, is exactly the kind of fallout that Local Law 1 was enacted to prevent.”