U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Aug. 21 dismissed a lawsuit against social media platform X brought by people with disabilities who were fired by the company after Elon Musk bought it.
Dmitry Borodaenko, an engineering manager who was with X until late 2022, said the firings violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by treating disabled workers differently from others.
“Borodaenko fails to show how employees with disabilities were treated differently by Twitter’s broad return-to-the-office policy and increased workload,” she said. “Borodaenko’s theory improperly relies on the assumption that all employees with disabilities necessarily required remote work as a reasonable accommodation.”
Borodaenko brought the case, and two other disabled former employees were later named as additional plaintiffs.
Arguments against X, formerly known as Twitter, partly rested on the experience of Hana Thier, one of the additional plaintiffs. According to the new ruling, Thier was improperly added after a different judge permitted Borodaenko to file an updated complaint.
Plaintiffs had alleged that Musk was “openly hostile towards disabled employees and insinuated that they were lazy,” and that he had “tweeted that a disabled former Twitter employee used his disability as an excuse not to work.”
Musk later apologized to the worker, who has muscular dystrophy, “for [his] misunderstanding of [the employee’s] situation.”
The plaintiffs also highlighted how Musk quickly reversed previously broad work-from-home policies after buying X, and said any employees who remained with the company would have to be exceptional people and work long hours.
While Musk’s comments “may contribute to a showing of animus, they fall short of illustrating how the new return-to-the-office and increased workload policies treated employees with disabilities differently than similarly-situated employees,” Martínez-Olguín said.
Accusations that Musk’s policies significantly discriminated against disabled workers and are not justified by business necessity also fell short, the judge said.
The allegations presented in the updated complaint “are nothing more than conclusions devoid of factual support,” she said, adding later that “the new allegations fail to move the needle to plead a plausible disparate impact claim.”
The earlier version of the lawsuit had been dismissed, but Borodaenko was allowed to file a new version.
The claims “were previously dismissed by the court because plaintiffs failed to allege facts to plausibly state a claim for relief under a theory of either disparate treatment or disparate impact disability discrimination,” lawyers for X said. “These same defects remain in the [updated complaint],” they said.
The judge dismissed the lawsuit but said that Borodaenko could file an amendment complaint that adequately fixes the failings within 28 days.
Lawyers for X and the plaintiffs did not respond to requests for comment.
