December 23: Filing for Retaliation

Two days before Christmas, I filed another federal charge.

I had been sent home on December 16. On December 20, I sent the agency a written request for guidance on how to follow its orders and still use my rights under the ADA. Nobody answered.

So on December 23, 2025, my attorney at the time filed a new charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I signed it under oath.

Why a Second Charge

My first charge, filed in November 2024, was about the harassment. The slurs, the closet, the supervisors who laughed along or led it.

What happened after I filed it was something different. For more than a year, I was kept under the same supervisors I had named. I was restricted, watched, accused, and finally labeled a danger and sent home. That isn’t just more harassment. Under federal law, being punished for filing a charge is its own violation, called retaliation. It needed its own charge.

The first charge wasn’t moving, either. In January 2026, the agency told the EEOC that in more than a year, the EEOC had not asked it for any further information about my first charge.

If filing one charge leads to more than a year of this, and the charge itself sits still, what exactly does the system expect an employee to do?

What I Reported

The new charge covered what happened from November 2024 through December 23, 2025. Some of it, you’ve already read in this series. Some of it, you haven’t. In summary:

• In January 2025, I was told I was not allowed to go into the back of the building or talk to anyone there.
• The district administrator followed me to a training class.
• I was told I could not help a coworker with reports.
• I was left out of a meeting that the rest of the office attended.
• I was required to show my supervisor everything I sent or received by email, along with every permit.
• I was told the district administrator was still making fun of me.
• My breaks were restricted, and at one point not approved in time for me to take one.
• In September 2025, I was falsely accused of telling a training instructor at the regional office that my two supervisors left early. For days afterward, both of them harassed me over it, and my direct supervisor called me a “pathological liar” more than once. They took the word of the coworker who reported it as fact. Nobody called the trainer to ask what I actually said. That same coworker is the one who, in December, would spend an afternoon in the hallway saying she might “do something.”
• In December 2025: the video in the truck, the afternoon in the hallway, the meeting run by the supervisor I had filed against, the agents, and the leave.

One more thing about September. The man who called me a pathological liar is the same supervisor who once told me that if a man with my name was arrested for child pornography in my city, he would believe it. The supervisor standing beside him is the one who told a work crew I “sashayed.” Neither of them has ever owned up to what they said. But I was the liar.

Each of those, on its own, might be explained away. Together, they are a year of what happens to an employee after he files a federal charge and nobody separates him from the people he named.

How many incidents does it take before a pattern is a pattern?

How to File an EEOC Retaliation Charge

If you’ve been punished for reporting discrimination or harassment, or for filing a charge, you can file a retaliation charge with the EEOC, even if your first charge is still open. Here’s how it works:

1. File within the deadline. In most cases, including in Alabama, that’s 180 days from the retaliation.
2. Start online through the EEOC’s public portal, by calling 1-800-669-4000, or at an EEOC office.
3. Complete an intake interview and describe each incident with dates, what happened, and who was involved.
4. Sign the charge. It’s made under penalty of perjury, so be accurate.
5. The EEOC notifies your employer, who can submit a written response. You can answer that response.

The EEOC explains the full process at eeoc.gov/filing-charge-discrimination.

What Came Next

Then came Christmas.

I spent the holidays on leave, with no answer to my request for guidance and no way to reach anyone at the agency without breaking the order I’d been given. I went to several therapy appointments. And I waited for the agency’s staff to come back to work after the holidays.

According to the agency, it received my new charge on December 30.

A month later, it sent the EEOC its response. It called my charge vague. You’ll get to see what else it said, and how it lines up with its own letter from December 16.

When an employee is sent home right before Christmas and asks in writing how to follow the rules, how long should he have to wait for an answer?

On Friday, I’ll post the next entry in this series: “I Asked for ADA Forms. I Was Threatened With Insubordination.”

The record continues.

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About this record: The events in The Foundation are documented in dated records and are consistent with statements I have given under penalty of perjury to the EEOC. Names are withheld; job titles are used instead. Commentary and opinions are my own.

For journalists, researchers, and advocates: If you are covering workplace bullying or public-employee accountability and need documentation or more detail, contact me at 9IX@9inthman.com.