A separation deal allegedly asked her to swear she'd filed nothing - she already had
A longtime Citi employee sued the bank over harassment. What happened next, she alleges, was retaliation.
A woman who spent more than fifteen years at Citigroup and Citibank has accused the company of retaliating against her after she took it to court, according to a complaint filed August 5, 2026, in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
The employee filed her first lawsuit - referred to in the new complaint as the "First Action" - on March 16, 2026, raising a sexual-harassment dispute and claims of sex-based pay discrimination. What followed, she alleges, was a series of moves designed to punish her for filing.
First came a separation agreement, delivered April 7, 2026. According to the complaint, one clause asked her to "represent and warrant that she had not filed, directly or indirectly, nor caused to be filed, any legal proceeding" against the company. She had filed one three weeks earlier. The filing says that representation "was inaccurate when Defendants delivered the agreement."
A revised agreement arrived May 11, 2026, six days after the company moved to compel arbitration in her first case, the complaint says. This version, she alleges, named her pending lawsuit by case number and tied her separation pay to a court order dismissing that case "with prejudice." According to the filing, she signed neither version.
The hiring sequence is the part likely to draw HR attention. The complaint alleges that Citi's own staff recruited the employee - she did not ask - for an open internal role while she was still employed, interviewed her on April 23, 2026, and told her to expect follow-up in about a week. The follow-up never came, she alleges, and the company selected a male candidate.
After her employment ended on May 7, 2026, the complaint says she applied for eleven open positions, submitting twelve applications between May 23 and June 1, 2026. On June 3, 2026, she sent the company's talent acquisition team a certified letter, return receipt requested, listing every application and asking for a status update. According to the filing, the company never replied and never interviewed her for a single role.
Her claims span four counts: retaliation under Title VII, sex discrimination for failure to hire, retaliation under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and retaliation under the Florida Private Sector Whistleblower Act. The complaint states she filed a second charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on May 14, 2026, and that the agency issued a right-to-sue notice on May 20, 2026.
For HR leaders, the alleged pattern points to concrete lessons. On these facts, the complaint casts a separation release that asks a departing worker to attest to something the employer already knows is untrue as an invitation to a retaliation claim. Pulling a candidate into an internal pipeline and then dropping her after she has engaged in protected activity carries the same alleged risk. And silence - no response to a documented, certified inquiry - is recast in the filing as an adverse action in its own right once litigation is underway. The complaint stresses that the company knew of the earlier case: it had been served, its litigation counsel had appeared, and the revised agreement named the case on its face.
None of the allegations have been tested in court, Citigroup and Citibank have not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled.
