Her own employer's probe backed her - then came the ratings cuts and displacement, she alleges
A former Wells Fargo employee says the bank's own investigation substantiated her discrimination and retaliation complaints - then, she alleges, the retaliation continued.
According to a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on July 28, 2026, the employee sued Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. for disability discrimination and retaliation under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act, or ADAAA. The case is Blair-Foster v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., No. 3:26-cv-610.
The filing says she joined the bank in 2019 and worked on regulatory matters tied to Wells Fargo's 2016 Sales Practices Consent Order. It alleges she earned "Exceeds Expectations" ratings in 2021 and 2022, then saw her scores fall - to "Meets Expectations" in a 2023 mid-year review, and to "Inconsistently Meets" at the end of 2024.
Those downgrades came with no coaching, corrective action, or performance improvement plan behind them, the complaint alleges. It says one manager told her, before retiring, that an executive director had directed him to lower her rating against his own recommendation.
The employee raised internal complaints of "discrimination" and "retaliation," according to the filing. It says an independent third-party investigator, in a review conducted between February and October 2024, substantiated those complaints. The bank then restored her bonus and moved her rating back to "Meets Expectations," the complaint says - but stopped short of returning it to the "Exceeds Expectations" level a manager had earlier recommended.
The complaint alleges the treatment continued after the investigation closed. It says her responsibilities were reassigned, she was left out of meetings, and she was instructed not to log parts of her work in the systems the bank used to track output - which, she alleges, created the false impression that she was doing less work than her peers.
On the accommodation, the filing says she had been approved to work remotely, then was subjected to a return-to-office policy and told to recertify her disability - a step she says she had been advised would not be needed unless she was promoted or transferred.
She was ultimately selected for displacement, the complaint says, and told at an April 29, 2025 meeting that the decision was not performance-based. The filing alleges the bank then kept reporting her as an active employee through December 19, 2025, delaying the release of her earned paid time off and retirement funds and making it harder to line up comparable work, including contract roles.
For HR leaders, the interest is in the process questions the filing raises, not any verdict. It centres on the gap between substantiating a complaint and actually remedying it, on rating changes the complaint says were made without contemporaneous documentation, and on the risk of leaving an employee inside the same reporting line that handled the original complaint. The filing says she flagged that last issue herself, through an internal "Loudspeaker" submission that proposed a formal closure process for people coming out of investigations - a suggestion the complaint says no department claimed as its own.
The complaint states she filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and received a dismissal and notice of rights before going to court.
The allegations in the complaint have not been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on the claims.
