ATLANTA (LN) — An Eleventh Circuit panel on Tuesday affirmed summary judgment for Vengroff Williams, Inc. and Second Look, Inc. — a separate Vengroff entity that sells subrogation services — against a former employee who claimed she was fired because of her disability and age, applying the convincing-mosaic standard alongside McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting at the Rule 56 stage.
Deborah Grey sued Second Look alleging her termination violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. She argued the district court wrongly concluded she had not established a prima facie case of disability discrimination and wrongly rejected her proposed age-discrimination comparator.
The panel, citing the court's recent decision in Ismael v. Roundtree, 161 F.4th 752 (11th Cir. 2025), laid out the framework district courts must follow: if a plaintiff cannot establish a McDonnell Douglas prima facie case, the court must advance directly to the convincing-mosaic inquiry rather than stop there. And once a defendant rebuts the prima facie presumption, McDonnell Douglas, with its presumptions and burdens, is no longer relevant — it simply drops out of the picture, the panel wrote, quoting Ismael's recitation of St. Mary's Honor Center v. Hicks — at which point the court must ask whether the full record, viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, presents a convincing mosaic of circumstantial evidence that would allow a jury to infer intentional discrimination or retaliation by the decisionmaker.
The panel stressed that "summary judgment should not be granted for failure to demonstrate pretext unless it also reflects a failure to put forward enough evidence for a jury to find for the plaintiff on the ultimate question of discrimination or retaliation," and that "evidence does not need to attack -- or even have anything to do with -- the defendant's purported rationale to help raise an inference of discrimination."
But Grey's case, the panel concluded, fell short even under that more plaintiff-friendly lens. The district court had assumed Grey made out a prima facie case of disability discrimination and still found she could not prove pretext; the panel therefore did not need to reach whether the prima facie showing was actually established. Grey argued that suspicious timing between her firing and a meeting she had asked to attend virtually should have survived summary judgment. The panel disagreed, pointing to an intervening May 4 meeting at which management expressed displeasure with her attitude, tone, and lack of productivity as the undisputed reason for her termination. The record contained no evidence of suspicious timing, ambiguous statements, or systematically better treatment of similarly situated employees.
On the age claim, Grey pointed to Maryann Vitkievicz — a colleague ten years her junior and under the same supervisor — as her comparator. The panel rejected that argument because the two women's job responsibilities differed materially: Grey's role was focused on selling subrogation insurance, while Vitkievicz's broader duties included developing a new sales market and creating a new company website. Their misconduct also occurred at different times; Grey's performance problems arose during her initial 60-day probationary period, when supervisors found her job performance unsatisfactory, found her disrespectful, and thought she wanted to lie to a potential client — issues the same senior staff did not report about Vitkievicz in her early employment.
The panel also held that any error from the district court's consideration of new evidence Second Look submitted on reply at the summary judgment stage was harmless, because that evidence bore only on the nature of certain meetings and was not determinative of the comparator question — and because Grey did not argue on appeal that a response to that evidence would have changed the outcome.
Grey's disability discrimination claim fared no better on the convincing-mosaic review. The panel held there was no genuine dispute of material fact that would allow a reasonable jury to infer Second Look fired her because of a disability, and affirmed on both claims.
The ruling was issued as a non-published, non-argument decision, meaning it carries no binding precedential weight in the circuit.