He says he warned his boss about his "mini-strokes." Then came the coaching plan, he alleges
A senior manager says his bank recast his heart condition as poor performance, then fired him - allegations Capital One has yet to answer.
Neil Zaccari had history with Capital One. According to a complaint filed June 5, 2026, in federal court in Virginia, he worked there for more than twelve years over three different time periods, most recently as a senior manager at the company's Goochland campus. Then his health gave way, and, he says, his career went with it.
Zaccari has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy - a thickening of the heart muscle - plus an irregular heartbeat that he says can cause "mini-strokes." The filing says that beginning in February 2023 he suffered severe episodes at work and on video calls: loss of speech, memory loss, crushing fatigue. Several, the complaint says, happened in front of his supervisor.
This is the part worth slowing down for. The complaint says Zaccari told his supervisor repeatedly what was going on and even asked him to watch for moments when he went unresponsive. He went to the on-site clinic, got referred to a cardiologist, and was later diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia. Even so, the filing says, his supervisor placed him on a "Coaching Plan" in May 2023, citing performance problems.
Most of those problems, the complaint alleges, were really symptoms. Zaccari says one cited issue - struggling to lead a meeting - was actually a medical event that left him unable to speak, the very kind of episode he says he had warned his supervisor about. The plan, according to the filing, flagged themes he had never been evaluated on and offered no measure of what success looked like.
When a new supervisor took over, Zaccari alleges things got worse. The complaint says the new supervisor "immediately set up Mr. Zaccari for failure," shutting him out of team meetings and emails and giving him work beneath his level, then faulting him when he fell out of step. According to the filing, the supervisor accused him of creating "unnecessary swirl" and of "being disruptive" for contacting the experts the plan had told him to consult.
Zaccari says he raised concerns internally more than once - with the company's Associate Relations group and with a director and assistant general counsel, who sent the complaints to HR. He did secure an accommodation: remote work with up to two hours of rest each day, which the filing says lasted until his termination.
Then the story shifts. Zaccari says that in February 2024, an HR employee told him someone had filed a complaint against him alleging racism and assigning work based on sex. He alleges those complaints were "fabricated" and tied to events from a year earlier. He also claims that work he had assigned to a female employee was being deleted from Capital One's Jira platform, which he says destroyed evidence that would have undercut the allegations against him.
Capital One terminated him on or about March 13, 2024, according to the complaint. He has brought two claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act - discrimination and retaliation - and is seeking back pay, front pay, compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney's fees. He has demanded a jury trial.
For HR teams, the lesson lands fast. The complaint's core theory is that a coaching plan, and later the threat of a performance improvement plan, became a way to document and penalize disability-related symptoms rather than real performance gaps - all after the employee had flagged a serious medical condition. That is the exact scenario accommodation training is built to prevent. Whether it happened here is now a question for the court.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Capital One has not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled. The account is Zaccari's alone.
