She had approved leave and accommodations. Her emails to leadership still got her fired
An employee who took multiple medical leaves and requested workplace accommodations was lawfully fired after sending critical emails about her bosses to university executives.
The case offers a reality check for HR departments navigating a familiar dilemma: what happens when an employee with active accommodation requests or recent medical leave behaves badly at work?
On February 12, 2026, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Indiana University did nothing wrong when it fired Jennifer Shirk, an online instructional designer who bypassed her supervisors to complain about management directly to senior university officials.
Shirk had worked her way up quickly at Indiana University's eLearning Design and Services Group. She started as an intern in September 2018 and was promoted twice within months, landing a role as an online instructional designer by February 2019.
Between October 2019 and April 2021, she took several extended leaves under the Family and Medical Leave Act to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. The university approved every request. In December 2020, she also asked for a long list of workplace accommodations: remote work, flexible hours, advance notice for meetings with written agendas, a support person at leadership meetings, shared document systems for project communication, and more transparency about her performance.
The university granted nearly everything except the support person at meetings, which it considered unnecessary and burdensome. When she suggested recording meetings instead, the university said no due to confidentiality concerns.
Things fell apart in April 2021 during a project meeting about the university's online orientation program. Director Justin Zemlyak mentioned a temporary funding gap for necessary licensing and said he would work with Chris Foley, who headed the Office of Online Education, to fix it.
Minutes later, Shirk emailed Foley herself, calling the situation urgent, blaming Zemlyak, and questioning whether he could handle the problem. Within half an hour, Zemlyak had shuffled budget money around to cover the costs and told Shirk through her supervisor. She agreed the solution worked but kept emailing Foley anyway, worried about documentation.
The next day, she escalated. She sent emails to both Foley and Julie Johnston, the Associate Vice President of Learning Technologies who was also Zemlyak's boss. Her message detailed how Zemlyak and her supervisor had mismanaged the situation, accused Zemlyak of scheming, interrupting her in meetings, and wasting resources. Johnston replied curtly: "The situation has been resolved."
That afternoon, Shirk sent another email defending her actions, saying management kept trying to silence her. She also mentioned she was a victim of discrimination and retaliation and that her work environment remained hostile.
The university scheduled a meeting to discuss the emails. Right after that meeting, Shirk requested another FMLA leave, which was granted. That same afternoon, Zemlyak decided to fire her. On April 23, 2021, the university sent her a termination letter citing serious misconduct for inappropriately sharing private internal matters with senior leadership and disparaging her supervisors in ways that threatened client relationships.
Shirk sued, claiming the university retaliated against her for taking medical leave and requesting accommodations. The district court sided with the university, and she appealed.
The appeals court addressed an important technical point. While disability discrimination claims require proof that disability was the only reason for firing someone, retaliation claims have a lower bar. The employee only needs to show that protected activity like taking medical leave was one reason for the termination, not the only one.
Even with that easier standard, Shirk lost. Her case relied heavily on comments from Lynch and Zemlyak when they learned about her September 2020 leave and accommodation requests. But the court said those remarks were about the lack of notice for her leave, not the leave itself. Lynch's observation that the accommodation requests looked more like a demotion than an accommodation reflected real concerns about whether the requests matched her job level. Zemlyak calling the requests ridiculous was just an offhand comment, especially since he later explained he thought the accommodations would apply to everyone.
More importantly, Lynch had no role in firing Shirk. Zemlyak made that call with an HR official, and the record showed they were focused on the emails, not her medical leave or accommodations. The university had approved every leave request and nearly every accommodation. Her discrimination complaints had been investigated and found lacking.
Shirk argued the email situation was just an excuse, claiming that Christy Cavanaugh, a supervisor in her unit, had helped draft the first email to Foley. The court noted the record was vague on this point but considered the argument anyway. Even so, the court disagreed. Cavanaugh was two management levels above Shirk, making them not comparable. And helping draft an email is very different from putting your name on it and hitting send.
Shirk also pointed to her mention of discrimination in her final email as proof of retaliation. The court rejected that too, saying employees cannot shield themselves from discipline by inserting discrimination complaints into otherwise inappropriate behavior.
The court noted Shirk was ignoring the obvious problem: her emails were highly inappropriate nature. She criticized her supervisors to top university leaders far above her pay grade, including the person who controlled most of her unit's funding.
For HR teams, the message is clear. Protected activity does not give employees a free pass on professional conduct. You can still enforce workplace standards even when someone has recently taken medical leave or requested accommodations. The key is consistency, documentation, and focusing on the actual misconduct rather than the protected activity.
