Thеse two consolidated suits, brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, charge sexual harassment by HUD, the plaintiffs’ employer, and also retaliation for complaining about the alleged harassment. The district judge granted HUD’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, so we take as true (of course without vouching for) the facts alleged in the complaint, which are as follows. In July 1993 the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development receivеd an anonymous letter accusing employees in HUD’s Chicago office of job-related sexual misconduct. The particular targets of the accusation were plaintiff Boockmeier, HUD’s Regional Inspector General for Investigations, and plaintiff McDonnell, the Assistant Regional Inspector General for Investigations and thus Boockmeier’s subordinate. Among the lurid charges was that McDonnell was Boockmeier’s “in-housе sex slave,” who provided sexual favors to him in exchange for more rapid promotion and other preferential treatment. The plaintiffs believe that the letter, and a follow-up letter that repeated the charges in the original letter, were the work of a disgruntled employee in HUD’s Office of Inspector General who wanted to ruin both plaintiffs’ careers.
After receiving the second letter, HUD began an investigation of the two plaintiffs. Because they were employed in the Inspector General’s office, which would normally conduct such an investigation, HUD retained investigators from the Defense Department. *258 They interviewed the plaintiffs and other employees of the Inspector General’s Office in a hostile and unprofessional manner, indicating to the persons they interviewed their personal belief that the plaintiffs were guilty of the charges made in the anonymous letters. The manner in which the investigation was conducted gave rise to even more lurid rumors, widely circulated within HUD, including rumors of incest and other sexual deviance on the part of Boockmeier and a rumor that Boockmeier was the true father of McDonnell's child. These rumors made the plaintiffs pariahs. Male employees of HUD shunned McDonnell, female employees Bo-ockmeier.
The investigation was completed in November of 1993 and completely exonerated both plaintiffs. Nevertheless they were advised by their superiors not to travel together or meet behind closed doors alone, lest they encourage a “perception” of sexual activity. Both during and after the investigation the plaintiffs complained to their superiors about the manner in which it was being conducted аnd demanded an investigation to determine the identity of their anonymous denouncer. Their superiors did nothing. On November 29, several weeks after he had filed an informal complaint that the treatment by the investigators constituted a form of sexual harassment forbidden by Title VII, Boockmeier was reassigned to HUD’s Washington office for 90 days, ostensibly to dilute any perception that he had a sexual relationship with McDonnell.
In March' of the fоllowing year, after McDonnell had filed and refused to withdraw similar (but formal) complaints on her own behalf, Boockmeier was told that his reassignment to Washington was being made permanent as a punishment for his having failed to control his subordinate — that is, to get McDonnell to drop her complaints. This sequence is the basis of Boockmeier’s claim of retaliation.
McDonnell also claims retaliation, and let us start there. She claims that management ostracized, disdained, and ridiculed her in retaliation for her having filed complaints. We do not doubt that anger, irritation, dirty looks, even the silent treatment, can cause distress and by doing so discourage complaints; and in other contexts even rather petty attempts at humiliation, if sufficient to deter the exercise of a right, have been held to be actionable as infringements of rights, for example the right of frеe speech.
Wallace v. Benware,
No limiting language appears in Title VII’s retaliation provision. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a). The language of “materially adverse employment action” that some courts employ in retaliation cases is a paraphrase of Title VII’s basic prohibition against employment discrimination, found in 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e-2(a)(1) and (2). Under these provisions, there is no actionable discrimination without something that can be described as an adverse employment action — “discriminat[ing] against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,” as subsection 2(a)(1) puts it, or “limit[ing], segregat[ing], or classifyfing] ... employees or applicants for employment in any way that would deprive or tend to
*259
deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee,” as subsection 2(a)(2) puts it. The provision regarding retaliation may intentionally be broader, since it is obvious that effective retaliation against employment discrimination need not take the form of a job action. Shooting a person for filing a complaint of discrimination would be an effective method of retaliation, though, as
Nelson
points out,
We need not try to sort out the tangle here. The complaint shows that there was no causal connection between McDonnell’s filing of the complaints and the alleged retaliation against her, so it becomes irrelevant whether the retaliation reached the level of severity at which the statute is triggered. The allegedly retaliatory conduct was merely the continuation of the conduct giving rise to the complaints. The basis of the complaints was that in response to groundless charges of sexual misconduct HUD subjected McDonnell to ostracism, disdаin, and ridicule and that these things continued after her formal exoneration. In other words, nothing changed when she filed her complaints. There was no ratcheting up of the harassment. Therefore the complaints could not have been the cause of the ostracism, disdain, and ridicule of which she complains in the retaliation count.
We can imagine an argument that these things would have petered out but for her complaints, which revitalized them. But the argument is not made. On the contrary, McDonnell’s underlying claim of sexual harassment includes the entire course of humiliation that she was subjected to both before and after she complained of the harassment. The complaints’ incremental effect on the amount or intensity of the humiliation to which she was subjected was by her own account zero.
Booekmeier has a solider retaliation claim, to which wе shall return after addressing the underlying claim of sexual harassment. The two types of claim, harassment (or other employment discrimination) and retaliation for complaining about or opposing the harassment, are independent. It is improper to retaliate for the filing of a claim of violation of Title VII even if the claim does not have merit—provided it is not completely groundless.
Dey v. Colt Construction & Development Co.,
We do not consider the claims of sexual harassment in this case frivolous, although we agree that it was right to dismiss them. Title VII does not prohibit sexual harassment as such, but it does prohibit discrimination, on grounds of sex, in working conditions. When a female worker is sexually harassed by male coworkers or supervisors, the result is to make the workplace less bearable for her because she is a woman than it is for the men who work beside her and, being male, are not harassed.
Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson,
Analysis is complicated by the fact that a difference in sex is not a necessary condition of sexual activity and hence (most courts think) of sexual harassment. There is plenty of homosexual activity these days (perhaps all days); some of it occurs in the workplace; and some involves the extorting of sexual favors by superiors, or other behaviors that when heterosexual expose employers to liability for sexual harassment in violation of Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination. E.g.,
Hopkins v. Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.,
We do not find this class of arguments compelling, and are rather surprised to find the Department of Justice urging them. Although supported by dicta in some cases,
id.; Rawinsky v. Bryan Independent School District,
Although we conclude that a claim of sexual harassment might arise from verbal harassment of a pair of male and female employees falsely accused of sexual hanky-panky in derogation of their duty to their emplоyer, we do not think it can do so in the circumstances detailed at such length in the complaint. The plaintiffs’ employer received a complaint of .job-related sexual misconduct by them. Although the complaint was anonymous, the plaintiffs do not argue that their employer was obliged or even entitled to ignore it. Employers who disregard charges of sex-related misconduct by their employees run a considerable risk of being sanctioned for having tolerated sexual harassment. It behooved HUD to investigate the charges against the plaintiffs, and since the plaintiffs were employed in the department’s investigative arm the department had to turn to another department for investigators. For this reason and to preserve an appearance of impartiality, HUD had to give the bloodhounds a long leash. Police officers, FBI agents, and other persons engaged in the investigation of misconduct, whether criminal or civil, sometimes stray across the indistinct line that separates vigorous from abusive investigation. The Defense Department’s investigators may have done so in this case. The question is whether an investigation of sexual harassment that exceeds the proper limits is itself a form of actionable sexual harassment.
*261
The objections to such an extensiоn of the concept of sexual harassment are both practical and doctrinal. The practical objection is that it places the employer on a razor’s edge. A parallel concern figured in this court’s and the Supreme Court’s decision that state welfare workers, who can be liable under the Constitution for removing children from parental custody without good cause, should not also be liable under the Constitution for failing without good cause to remove children from parental custody.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services,
The law does sometimes place people on a razor’s edge, where they face liability for doing either too much or too little. But here we are being asked to extend the law to bring about this result, and we are reluctant to dо this. We are especially reluctant because Congress has made specific provision with respect to the legal remedies of victims of improper investigation by federal officers—which brings us to the doctrinal objection to the extension of accepted principles that the plaintiffs seek. If, as alleged, the investigators in this case told the people whom they were interviewing that the plaintiffs had engaged in job-related sexual misconduct, then, because the statement was false and defamatory, the investigators committed the tort of defamation, for which the plaintiffs could sue them. But the investigators would have a defense of qualified immunity.
Buckley v. Fitzsimmons,
The plaintiffs’ counsel pointed to the Federal Tort Claims Act’s exclusion of defamation as a reason for wanting to shoehorn the investigators’ misconduct into Title VII. The exclusion weakens rather than strengthens the plaintiffs’ case. When Congress crafts particular remedies for particular wrongs, the presumption is that these are the exclusive remedies and that such limitations as they may embody аre not to be circumvented by extending a more generally worded statute over the subject of the more specific one. E.g.,
Seminole Tribe v. Florida,
— U.S.-,-,
We turn to Boockmeier’s claim of retaliation. The claim, or at least so much of *262 it as survives other objections, alleges retaliation for Boockmeier’s failure to prevent McDonnell and others from filing complaints, rather than for filing his own complaints. Such a clаim does not come within the scope of the retaliation provision of Title VII if interpreted literally. That provision merely forbids the employer to “discriminate against any individual ... because he has made a charge ... or participated in any manner in an investigation, proceeding, or hearing under” Title VII. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a). The reason for this wording, however, so far as we are able to discover (there is no pertinent legislative history), is that in the ordinary case an employer would have no reason to retaliate against someone who did not file a complaint, testify, etc. Generally one retaliates against someone because of something he did rather than because of something someone else did. Not always. There is such a thing as collective punishment. But that possibility is unlikely to have been in the forefront of congressional thinking when the retaliation provision was drafted.
There are two situations, apparently not foreseen by Congress, in which a literal interpretation of the provision would leave a gaping hole in the protection of complainants and witnesses. The first situation, related to our point about collective punishment, is where the employer either does not know who the complainant is and decides therefore to rеtaliate against a group of workers that he knows includes the complainant, or makes a mistake and retaliates against the wrong person. The second situation, which is this case, is where the employer retaliates against an employee for having failed to prevent the filing of a complaint. Both are cases of genuine retaliation, and we cannot think of any reason (and the government has suggested nоne), other than pure oversight, why Congress should have excluded them from the protection of section 2000e-3(a). It does no great violence to the statutory language to construe “he has made a charge” to include “he was suspected of having made a charge” and “he allowed a charge to be made.”
Wu v. Thomas,
The same provision, moreover, forbids retaliating against an employee “because he has opposed any practice made an unlawful employment practice” by Title VII. Several courts, including our own, hold that assisting another employee with his (in this case her) discrimination claim, as well as other endeavors to obtain the employer’s compliance with Title VII, is proteсted “opposition conduct.” We said in
Rucker v. Higher Educational Aids Bd., supra,
The complaint does not spell out the measures that Booekmeier was expected to take to prevent McDonnell from complaining, but such specificity is not required in a complaint. As McDonnell's direct superior, Bo-ockmeier undoubtedly could harm her career — as his superiors must have known. And there is little doubt that the chain of retaliations would be adverse job actions — if the retaliations forbidden by Title VII are, to recur to an earlier discussion, so limited. *263 Also, the defendant does not argue that Bo-ockmeier’s punitive reassignment was not an adverse job action.
We believe that it was an error to dismiss the part of Boockmeier’s complaint that charges retaliation. With this exception, the judgment is affirmed.
Affirmed in Pakt, Reversed in Part, and Remanded.