When Ellen Mendelsohn decided to file an age discrimination lawsuit in 2002 against her
former employer, Sprint/United Management Co., she quickly learned that she wasn’t the only employee who had a beef with the company. In support of her lawsuit, five other employees came forward with testimony that they too had been subject to age discrimination or that they had heard Sprint managers make disparaging remarks about older workers.
There was one major hole in Mendelsohn’s alleged evidence of discrimination–none of those
employees worked for the same managers who were involved in the decision to terminate Mendelsohn during a downsizing. On Sprint’s motion, the trial judge excluded this testimony as irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial to Sprint.
