$235,000 Settlement After Library of Congress Fired Gay Auditor Over Facebook Discovery

Peter TerVeer joined the Library of Congress as a temporary management analyst in February 2008, converted to a full-time position that October, and earned a promotion the following spring. Nothing in his record suggested what came next.

In August 2009, TerVeer's supervisor, senior auditor John Mech, learned TerVeer was gay after Mech's daughter saw TerVeer had "liked" a page called "Two Dads" on Facebook and told her father. The harassment was immediate. Mech sent TerVeer emails quoting scripture condemning homosexuality, called a private meeting to "educate him on hell," and subjected him to verbal abuse in front of colleagues. Performance reviews that had been clean suddenly showed negative marks. Transfer requests went nowhere.

By October 2011, TerVeer was placed on unpaid leave. He filed an internal discrimination complaint in September 2011; the Library denied it in May 2012. On April 6, 2012, he was terminated, officially for missing 37 workdays during a period he said was approved medical leave. He told NBC4 Washington he had $12 to his name and had recently been evicted.

Attorney Thomas Simeone, joined by co-counsel Glen Ackerman and Christopher Brown, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on August 3, 2012. The complaint raised seven counts including gender discrimination, religious discrimination, and retaliation under Title VII, as well as Fifth Amendment due process and equal protection claims. The central legal theory was sex stereotyping: Mech discriminated against TerVeer because TerVeer, a gay man, did not conform to Mech's view of acceptable male gender roles, and courts had long recognized that kind of gender-nonconformity discrimination as actionable sex discrimination under Title VII.

The Library of Congress moved to dismiss. On March 31, 2014, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied the motion and allowed the sex-stereotyping claim to proceed. Law360 reported the ruling as an early application of the gender-stereotyping doctrine to a gay federal employee's discrimination claim.

The case settled on December 8, 2015. The Library of Congress paid TerVeer $235,000 in full and final satisfaction of all claims, with no admission of liability. The court dismissed the action three days later.