Her attempts to use Ford's own reporting channels allegedly made things worse
A new lawsuit accuses Ford's own HR team of silencing harassment complaints and helping push out the employee who raised them.
Ayanna A. Lynn, a former quality engineer at Ford Motor Company's Chicago Assembly Plant, filed an 11-count lawsuit on March 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Lynn v. Ford Motor Company, Case No. 1:26-cv-03184), alleging that the company's human resources apparatus did not merely fail her — it worked against her.
The case has not been decided, and the allegations have not been proven in court. Ford has not yet filed a response. But the picture painted in the filing is one that HR leaders will want to sit with.
According to the lawsuit, Lynn reported unwelcome sexual advances from Quality Manager Sunil Archante to her direct supervisor, Process Engineering Manager Domanique Rawls, in December 2024. Rawls allegedly laughed it off. Lynn escalated to Final Area Manager Tracy Carter. He allegedly did the same.
Then, the filing alleges, Rawls began directing personal and romantic attention toward Lynn — asking her to watch her young son, accompany her to sign real estate documents, and sharing unsolicited personal messages. Lynn says she made clear she was not interested. What followed, according to the lawsuit, was a swift shift in how she was treated at work: a contradictory performance review, sabotage of a Kaizen project she was leading, and blocked transfer requests justified by claims of "declining performance" and "bad behavior" that had no documented basis.
The filing's most striking allegations center on what happened when Lynn tried to use the systems that were supposed to protect her. After she submitted a formal retaliation report through Ford's QR code portal on June 11, 2025, Labor Relations Manager Tiffani Orange allegedly told her the system was "not for retaliation" — even though the portal itself listed retaliation as a reportable category. Lynn says she sent Orange a screenshot proving as much. She received no reply.
Over the following months, Lynn says she filed written reports with a plant investigator, emailed an HR representative, and raised concerns with the assistant plant manager. According to the lawsuit, none of it led to meaningful action.
Perhaps the most jarring allegation involves a warning Lynn says she received from Calvin Washington, whose wife, Staci Washington, served as a Labor Relations Area Manager. He allegedly told Lynn she was going to "get walked out" — information the filing says he obtained through his wife's access to confidential HR information. The lawsuit frames this as evidence that labor relations was working to remove Lynn rather than protect her.
Ford terminated Lynn on September 8, 2025, citing performance issues, bad behavior, and threatening conduct. The lawsuit contends every stated reason was pretextual and that the real motivations were her rejection of unwanted advances, her harassment reports, and her disability — a diagnosed anxiety disorder.
The case also invokes the 2025 amendments to the Illinois Whistleblower Act, which broadened what counts as retaliation and introduced civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation.
This is not Ford's first time under the microscope over conditions at its Chicago facilities. In 2017, the automaker agreed to pay up to $10.125 million to resolve an EEOC harassment investigation at its Chicago assembly and stamping plants. Subsequent lawsuits have called the company a "recidivist offender."
No determination has been made on the merits of this case. But for HR teams everywhere, the allegations alone read like a cautionary roadmap of what can go wrong when internal systems exist on paper but not in practice.
