The Case of Kristie Metcalfe

I can finally play with other people.

“I'm pretty competitive, it's fun to beat friends and co-workers.”

I have a J for 10 points. I'm guessing Tenga is not a word, let's see. Tenga is a word. Oh! As an English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words.

Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily. Over the last year, the Trump administration has dramatically changed the kinds of civil rights cases it pursues. Gone is the focus of fighting race-based discrimination, the very purpose for which the civil rights division at the Justice Department was founded.

And instead, the department's focusing on things like transgender women in sports and anti-Christian bias. And it's going one step further, abandoning cases already in progress. Today, we want to tell you about one of those cases, and to do that, we're doing something a little different. We're bringing our colleague Sarah Canick from serial productions to tell you the story of one woman, who civil rights case was turned upside down by these changes that we've all been seeing.

It's Friday, March 13th, and here is Sarah. A while back, I got a hold of this list. It was a rundown of all these civil rights cases that were not going to happen. They'd all been dropped or set aside by the Department of Justice.

And I saw one I'd never heard of, a small case, straightforward, one simple issue, easy to get your head around.

That's the one I want to tell you about. It's the story of a woman named Christy Metcalf. She's the subject of the lawsuit. Once I talked to her, I understood this small case and how it was squandered.

“Is this clear window as any into how civil rights enforcement is operating right now?”

Christy Metcalf is a lawyer. The job she does is not the flashy kind of luring. It's the unsung kind of luring. Christy Metcalf drafts legislation, or at least for much of her career she did. When senators in the Mississippi legislature wanted to change the rules of their state, Christy wrote the bills to make that happen.

You are nonpartisan and you work for all of the senators. So I certainly had my share of drafting legislation that I personally did not agree with. A lot, a lot of that. Christy would leave out her own two cents. Instead she'd explain to the senators what the Mississippi Constitution said.

What the US Constitution said, why the thing they were proposing might not pass muster if challenged in court. And a lot of times she told me the senators did not care. All right, fine, whatever. I'll draft it. But generally, did you like the work? Yes, yes, I did.

She respected the process. She had faith in its fairness. And can I just ask, I mean, this is a question that it's hard to maybe to answer, but were you good at it? Were you good at it? Yes, you are.

Yes, yes, yes. No, that's not.

“I love that question because here's the thing.”

I come from super middle class backgrounds.

Okay, so I always felt like it was important to draft legislation in a way that any person could read it.

Uh-huh. It's just useless to talk about res. If it's a local to a lay person, like they don't care. What are you talking about? It's Latin stuff like that.

That mean anything to me. I mean, I got two degrees. I got a lot of degree. I don't know what it means when you say not with standing as provided in. Yes.

No, it in every piece of legislation that I draft it at the request of a senator. I tried to do it in a way with my mom and mine. Can this licensed cosmatologist understand this piece of legislation that doesn't have anything to do with her actual job? Right.

I wanted somebody that I knew a regular person, educated or not, to be able to understand that. Christie grew up in rural Alabama, as she mentioned, super middle class background. Her mom worked in a manufacturing plant and later got a cosmatology license,

She watched her many siblings go to college, then go into law enforcement or the military. After Christie graduated from college, she worked at a bank for a while, saved up her money, and off she went to law school at the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss. She screamed to pay for it, took loans, lived in public housing, and she did what was expected of her. She excelled. She was an editor on the law journal, and in 2010 she was about to graduate Magnacoon Laudy

into an economy still limping from recession. The law firms she'd clerked out over the summers weren't hiring. She had nothing lined up. Her prospects were not looking good. But Christie is not someone who folds. One day, the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court came to speak at Ole Miss. And Christie took a chance.

After his talk, she marched up to him and asked for a clerk position. The Chief Justice, that is so ballsy, I'm allowed to say ballsy. Like, yes, really. Wow. Okay. And I was just, that was where I was in my life. I was like, I can't, I can't let this fail. And the Chief Justice hired her. Christie loved that job.

Your later, she went on to clerk for another judge. The first African-American woman appointed to an appeals court in Mississippi.

And that judge had once worked for the State Senate as a staff attorney. I didn't know that legislative counsel or assignment attorney. I didn't know that was a job. In undergrad, Christie had double major in English and political science. She loved writing, she loved politics, plus if you worked a public service job for 10 years, you could get student loan forgiveness.

“And how it's like, oh, this is perfect. You know, can I go do this job?”

Yes, she could with the answer, especially since there hadn't been a black attorney at the Senate for decades. And the black caucus had been agitating directify that. The Senate hired young Christie Metcalf at a salary of $55,000 a year, about five grand more than she'd been making as a judicial law clerk. So to get 55 or whatever it was, I thought, okay, great. I'm making, I'm making more. This is great. And I negotiated it for higher than what they offered me initially.

And I thought, I thought I was on cloud nine. You know, I just didn't.

What did they first offer you, do you remember?

I believe it was 52,000. And you did the thing that like historically women are less good at doing or less apt to do, which would be like, I'm worth more than that. I would like some more. You actually did it. Yes, yes. I negotiated it for more. And I thought I was, I thought I was really doing something. Well, you were.

I had no idea I'm negotiating like 20,000 less than that. I've been negotiating.

“Like they say 52 and you should have been like, how about 95?”

Right, right. Exactly. Exactly, because that is what the next lowest salaries were in her same office. 95,500, which a month later got pumped up to 114,000. Christy was being paid 55,000 less than half what her colleagues were getting. And she knew that. She knew she'd be making way less than everyone else before she accepted the job.

She said she'd asked about it. When I brought it up, they said, well, salaries are based on seniority. So the longer you work here, the more you will get paid. Right. And that seemed reasonable to you. Absolutely. That seemed reasonable.

The other lawyers, they'd all been there forever, 20 years, even 30 years. And here, Christy was a baby lawyer, not even two years out of law school. And the economy was crap. So she's not about to get greedy. Then there was this other thing. Another subterranean reason she accepted her roughly 50% lower salary.

It was a saying she'd heard from her parents from everyone around her really. As a black girl growing up in the south, you're going to work twice as hard to get half as far. That's probably a common added in a lot of black households.

“It's something that I remember from even being an elementary school.”

Twice as hard for half as far seems like you'll never catch up.

Right. And I think it was probably that for perhaps my parents.

Twice as hard to achieve the same thing.

Either way, the math is unfair.

“But for a long time, Christy didn't think of it as a problem to correct.”

A person doesn't think about pursuing her rights under the law for something that just is. Well, this is the way it's supposed to be. I am supposed to work harder. I have to. Christy's eventual lawsuit, as you might have guessed by now, was about equal pay. When you read it, the stakes of her fighter obvious, money and fairness. In the complaint, those twin peaks are clear.

What you don't see is the earthy mess below, all the other stuff, the muddy complications of life, that Christy was navigating on her slow-moving salary as the years ticked by.

Her first four years on the job, she got a few routine raises.

And by January of 2016, her salary was up, from $55,000 to more than $63,000. And she was fine with that. The job suited her. She drafted bills for seven state senate committees, including corrections. Sometimes calls would get routed to Christy from confused family members of incarcerated people, and she'd look their relative up on the DOC website and explain when they might get out.

Answering calls like that meant a lot to her. Christy herself had a family member who'd been incarcerated, and she saw how the uncertainty ate in her mom.

“See, that's why it's important she thought to have people like me in this job.”

But the raises she got, the other senate attorneys got them too. So her paycheck was still far behind. And yes, okay, seniority, but after a while, a retort was starting to echo in Christy's head. I am doing substantially the same job as everyone else, and getting paid substantially less. She thought about asking for more money, but 2016 turned into a swirl of medical and family crises.

Christy's mother was diagnosed with cancer, which she did not survive. Christy reeled from the loss, and the months afterwards she was having headaches, which she attributed to sadness and stress. Until this one day, everything went black, and Christy was out. She remembers coming to a few days later, comically confused, asking where nurse she was, what had happened on Game of Thrones, and can someone hand me my bag?

“And I was like, where's my lipstick? I need lipstick. And my best friend was there, and they were like, you have a brain tumor.”

And I was like, no, I don't. Well, not a tumor in her brain, but a tumor in her head that was pressing on her brain, and that would require major surgery and craniotomy. Throughout all this, her mother's death, her father's subsequent decline, her own illness, her boss and colleagues at the senate were understanding. People even donated their own leave time to her, so she could recover at home. In other words, this was not the time to ask for a raise.

I just didn't see a point in that year where I could ask for that. I was just, I'm southern, I'm polite. I don't want to cause any problems. Yeah, I wasn't thinking about it in that manner of this is not right. She needed this job. She still had those law school loans. She needed the health insurance. She liked this job.

And the senate did seem to appreciate her work, and it also seemed to wear that she was underpaid. In 2017, she got a bigger raise, a 10% raise, and then another 10% raise a year and a half later, her salaries now up to 77,000. So she thinks maybe they're going to make this right on their own without me having to complain. But things quickly changed. In 2018, one of the longtime senate attorneys retired.

The committee assignments got shuffled around so that now, Christie would be responsible for drafting legislation for 10 committees out of 30 total. She didn't have the most demanding ones, finance judiciary appropriations, but still 10 committees is a lot. About twice as many as a couple of the other attorneys. The senate hired an attorney to replace the guy who left.

He was the first new hire since Christie, seven years earlier.

And this new hire, a white guy, was going to be paid, you guessed it, more than Christie. Twenty four thousand dollars more. His salary would be 101,500. This was Christie's last straw. In November, she complained. She went to the director of legislative services to the secretary of the senate and to the senate president Pro Tem.

Guy named Terry Burton. They tossed out a bunch of reasons why the new hire salary was going to be higher than hers.

He was taking a pay cut to come to the senate. He was older, so he needed more money to make this transition.

He'd been out of law school for close to twenty years. And he had a PhD. Yes, I said he had a PhD. He went to a great law school. You know, and then they said again, he's got a PhD. One afternoon, not long after that conversation, Christie's suddenly summoned to a meeting with Senator Burton,

whose rules committee approved salaries for senate staff. She goes into his office thinking it's just going to be her and Senator Burton. But three other senate people are in there too. Feels to her like an ambush. Like the purpose of this meeting isn't to make things right. It's to quail her complaint. Terry Burton did most of the talking.

He said that he was offended and mad that it got out.

That the new attorney was going to be paid more than what I was being paid. That it was unfair. He said to the new attorney. Senate salaries are public, but the new guys hadn't been published yet. To be clear, Christie had nothing against the particular guy who was hired. And nothing against PhDs.

“And I think it's wonderful that somebody has a PhD. That's amazing.”

That's great. But it doesn't have anything to do with what we do as senate attorneys. And I told them that. Especially when your PhD thesis is titled Dominion and Communion. Petristic theology and the ethics of humanities relationship with animal creation. And yes, he had gotten his law degree eight years earlier than Christie.

But he'd been actually practicing law for about the same amount of time as she had. And crucially, he had no experience drafting legislation. Zero. In fact, to train this new hire, they were keeping on part time. The attorney he was supposed to replace.

Later, she too would be asked to pitch in on training the new guy. In the meeting, Terry Burton was asking for her understanding. But she wasn't giving it to him. She didn't think any of their reasons held water. This was not fair. And this was not how things had operated before.

“Well, it sounds kind of like it was how things have operated before, wasn't it?”

I mean, the whole time you're being behaved significantly less than anybody else. I say that it's not because throughout my tenure with the senate, I was told your salary is based on years of experience. I was told that over and over again. So if it wasn't about seniority, then what was it about? It's not like discrimination hadn't occurred to her, obviously.

She's black, female, head medical issues. She'd spent her life in Alabama and Mississippi. It wasn't a stretch for her to believe she could be a target. There had been some unpleasantness before. She told me about one colleague, for instance, "Who kissed you remembered saying stuff like, "Well, my grandmother used to call black women, niegresses." She just had a knack for saying, "Well, these were people in my family who said the inward.

And this was a context in which they said it. Is that okay?"

And the answer is always no.

And I was like, "How am I the first person that you're meeting?" I was telling you that this is not okay.

“But I dealt with it because I think they were not used to working with somebody of color.”

And they just, they didn't know. Christy took the most generous view a person could take in this situation. This is an individual offense she thought, not a systemic one. I can handle it. And sure she didn't have much in common with her colleagues. They were older, white, and mostly men. An accurate reflection, in fact, of the Mississippi legislature itself.

But generally, she got along just fine with them. She said she'd never had a complaint about her work. Her committees seemed to value her expertise. That said, Christy knew she wasn't the only Senate employee who felt intentionally underpaid. She knew or knew of at least three other black people, all women, who'd complained of the same. Back in 2013, one woman had even sued in federal court on successfully.

This situation, though, with the new hire, this was not working twice as hard to get just as far in a way Christy could live with. Is that when you started to think, like, "Oh, I see this is racial discrimination. I thought this was something else, but I'm seeing it now." Or, "Did you know, did you feel like that all along?"

They're doing this to me because I'm a buckleman and they feel like they can. "I felt like it somewhat before, but it became very apparent when they hired a white male

Like, it's undeniable at that point. Terry Burton did not want to talk to me for this story, so I don't have his version of events. But I was able to interview someone who worked in the same office as Christy. A long time-scented attorney named Larry Richardson. I explained to Larry how, in the beginning, the huge paid discrepancy made sense to Christy.

She said, "Well, I was told it was all based on seniority." And that... Go ahead, I'm sorry. Larry Richardson had retired by the time the new guy was hired. So he wasn't there for the aftermath.

But he told me he'd been agitating for years over what he saw as unfair pay for Senate staff. He said, "The seniority thing? That's BS."

“"The best way to describe the sourced and all intellectual electric is just half-passed.”

It's always good to be okay."

He said he'd collected all this data, which he'd eventually presented to the rules committee, showing how other legislative employees were better paid than Senate attorneys. For no good reason. But even if salaries were based on seniority, Larry said Christy's pay gap specifically made no sense to him. First of all, if you start someone that low at 55,000 and everyone's getting raises along the way.

"She will never catch up. Do you think the problem?" And then to hire the new guy for way more money, he said he was flabbergasted when he saw that. "There's no reason for that kind of disparity. Just based on qualifications to work, she knew the Senate rules."

Christy met with her committees, showed up on the floor.

“Even when her close family had serious health problems, and then she, herself, had been sick.”

Larry didn't recall anyone having to cover for him.

"I never heard any complaints.

And I would have heard them. But no, I never heard any complaints about her." "You also didn't hear any gossip or something. No girl is really a pain in the butt or something." She did the job, Larry said, and people seem to like her.

As to whether racial discrimination might have been the reason Christy was paid less. Larry couldn't say, but he did work at the legislature for 37 years. So we offered a general assessment. The Senate just historically has been quite. In that meeting, Christy had with Senator Terry Burton.

She said he told her something she found odd. He said the Senate wasn't bound by any Mississippi State personnel rules or regulations. Or any rules, they didn't have to follow anything regarding pay, posting jobs on the website, or setting formal standards for job qualifications. He said the Senate can, quote, "Do what it wants," unquote.

Christy thought, but there's a whole federal law that says you shouldn't do this. That federal law is known as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says an employer cannot discriminate against someone based on their race, sex, religion, etc. Christy could have filed a Title VII complaint right away with the EEOC. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency then investigates workplace discrimination claims.

Instead, she waited. She told me she just didn't believe it in their collective Senate heart. Anyone thought this paid discrepancy was truly okay. Surely they'd correct it on their own. Three months went by, five months, nothing.

Christy's part of an organization that mentors young women.

“She was always telling them, "You have to stand up for yourself."”

And that women are important. Black women are important. You need to run for office, you need to get involved in your political environment, your voice matters. And I felt like, "I'm a hypocrite if I don't move forward with this." There was a statutory time limit for Christy to file with the EEOC.

So if she was going to do it, it was now or never.

I went and found that complaint. After the break, Sarah Canick returns with the rest of Christy's story. Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We would love to officially share my New York Times subscription with separate logins.

Girlie, I want a sheet panel. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling. I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed.

“And I think him having his own profile would be great.”

Ashley, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times family subscription. You get your own login and Mr. elaborate gets his. Plus, room for two others. Find out more at nytimes.com/family. Once Christy met Kaffe filed her complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission,

alleging discrimination was the reason for her low salary. She figured it was a no-brainer. They'll see they violated federal law. They'll fix it. If for no other reason, then it'd get me to shut up about it. Instead, as the EEOC investigated, the Mississippi Senate dug in.

They never claimed Christy had done anything wrong at work or wasn't good at her job.

“Instead, they argued that the new guy was getting more money because his job working with the finance committee”

required more "skill, effort and responsibility" than Christy's. When the EEOC didn't buy that, the Senate argued instead that she wasn't a protected employee under Title VII. Christy couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to represent her side in the EEOC case, so she did it herself, referring to herself in the third person. Met Kaffe contends that there is direct evidence, et cetera.

Meanwhile, working at the Senate was becoming intolerable. She and her fellow attorneys had always worked well together before, helped each other out. But now her colleagues stopped talking to her. She said she learned later they'd been told to quote "limit" contact. Gossip would float back to her. Oh, she felt an EEOC complaint.

If she's so unhappy, why isn't she just leave? Other attorneys would drop their bills on her desk to finish. And the past you might offer to pitch in in a crunch, but this felt different, like she was being punished. I kind of became the repository for bills that no other attorney wanted to draft. And I was generally just cut out of the general conversations that would happen amongst the attorneys.

And during this time, I started second-guessing my decision to file the charge, because I was afraid of being blackballed.

And I kept thinking, "Well, this is it. I've made this wrong decision." And I'm going to ruin it for any other black woman who might want to work here and they're not going to consider her. And I put a lot of this pressure on myself and was just, I was having a very, very tough time. And I didn't have anyone else who had been in a similar situation to really even talk to about this. And so I felt very, very much alone.

Her relationship with her husband and her stepkids was suffering from all this too. He'd been pushing her for a while to leave this job that didn't seem to value her, that kept them living apart during the work week. She and Jackson, he and Columbus, the two and a half hour drive each way. Chrissy's mental health got so bad, she felt like she was at a breaking point. About five months after she filed the EEOC complaint, she quit.

The EEOC did its thing. Investigators interviewed people at the Senate, comb through the documentation. What they were looking for in part is whether they can find any non-discriminatory reason to explain the disparity in Chrissy's pay. Seen you already say, "That's a valid non-discriminatory reason." Or lesser qualifications, or lousy job performance, they could not find anything. About two years after she filed her claim, the EEOC made its determination,

and it sided with Christy. The EEOC said there was "reasonable cause" to believe that the Mississippi Senate paid Christy Metcalf disparate wages because of her race, in violation of Title VII. The EEOC tried to settle the claim. Christy wouldn't sue the Senate if they agreed to stop discriminating. And they'd need to develop and implement policies prohibiting retaliation, and train staff on those policies.

And they need to pay Christy more than $200,000 in back pay and damages.

“The Senate came back with a counteroffer. How about we don't do any of that?”

And instead we pay Christy $5,000, and we invite her to never apply to work here ever again.

How about that? This was playing out in legalese, of course. Now, Christy wrote back from the heart in first person. She read it aloud for me.

The stress of knowing they were paying me less to do the same job as another employee,

also seeped into my home and marriage.

“I felt like she'd sought help from more than one therapist she wrote.”

Her husband had filed for divorce, ending her contact with her stepkids. By now, it was year two of the pandemic. She had a hard time finding work. For a while, she worked as a leasing agent for an apartment complex, where she'd cleaned the units before showing them their respective renters. When she thinks of it now, cat shit comes to mind. She eventually started managing the place and exchanged for discounted rent. The hardest job of her life, she said.

When she finally got an attorney position, it was a child protective services, but it practically killed her, how depressing it was.

The EEOC and the Mississippi Senate could not come to an agreement about how to solve Christie's case. So the EEOC called it quits, passed the case along to the Department of Justice. Saying, essentially, we think there's been discrimination here, do what you will. Christie's case landed in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. In the section that litigates employment discrimination, where they don't mess around, they only pick fights they're fairly certain they can win.

And Christie's case made the cut. It was chosen not just for investigation, but eventually for litigation and even higher bar.

In late 2024, more than five years after Christie had made her initial complaint, the DOJ filed a lawsuit on her behalf.

After the cancer and your mom dying and the tumor in your head and the meanness and the divorce and the catch it and the child abuse evidence you can't unsee,

“I ask Christie, dumbly, do you remember when you got the news?”

What was that like? I remember. Sarah, I thought it was such a huge win for me. Yeah. But more importantly, for the other women who weren't from the Senate, because they had worked there longer than I did.

You know? And had dealt with these situations and been ignored when they brought it up to the rules committee. I thought that meant that what I was arguing was justified and they saw a point in all of it. And I thought it was huge. I thought that people would see this as a slam dunk.

I don't know how other attorneys feel with what they have contributed to the legal profession, but I wanted to add something. And if that something was that women, black women, black people could get paid, the equivalent of what their counterparts were being paid. I thought that was the thing I could add to that was my legal legacy. And I thought this was my case, you know? Yeah.

So began the swift, stunted life of United States of America, the Mississippi State Senate. The complaint didn't have any fancy footwork.

“I think I can safely say it's one of the more boring lawsuits I've ever read.”

It didn't bother to tell a story, it didn't need to. The unfairness argument was all in the numbers, essentially a rundown of Christie's salary as compared to her colleague's salaries. The whole thing is only eight pages long, and the eighth page is just people's contact information, so really seven pages. Cases like these usually end in a settlement, and that was the government's hope for Christie's case. A DOJ trial attorney named Lewis Whitsett explained all this to Christie.

Lewis told me that he felt like I had a great case. But as in Hollywood, so too in Washington, D.C., timing is everything. Christie's case was filed November 8, 2024, just a few days after Donald Trump won the presidential election. Over the next couple months, the Mississippi AG's office slowly rolled, asking for extensions to respond to the DOJ complaint.

Maybe you also see where this is going, but in case you don't. Two days after Trump took office, his administration put a freeze on any new civil rights litigation, and planned to review any cases filed within the past few months, including Christie's.

“Mississippi was asking the DOJ, so this case is on ice, right? It's stayed for now?”

And Lewis Whitsett from the Civil Rights Division was saying, repeatedly, "No, it's not. There's no stay." Yes, the new bosses were reviewing Christie's case, but that wasn't totally unexpected, or even alarming. Every new administration takes stock, pushes its own priorities. Christie's case didn't really seem vulnerable, such a small case. The legal argument they were making wasn't controversial, and the pay issue itself wasn't hot button.

Wasn't about discrimination against a trans employee, for instance. And besides, new administrations usually influence civil rights litigation at the front end, when cases are getting chosen, not midstream. So Christie's case, tidy, solid, already underway, seems safe. Until suddenly, it wasn't. Early last year, Christie got a call from the DOJ attorneys.

The case was being stayed. Christie told them, "Okay, that's fine. Just another delay, right?" And then about six weeks later, another call. And it was very, very short and sweet with them saying, "We have been directed to dismiss your case."

And my first question was, "Why?"

Because in my mind, I'm thinking, "We just talked not too long ago, and you told me that there was a stay issue." And that my case was not being dismissed that a lot of other people's cases just went away. So what happened that made my case past Mr. at some point under this administration's department of justice to where now it does not. And they said, "We can't tell you anything else." Even if the president had changed, Christie thought, I mean, the law hasn't changed, right? Title VII is still a thing.

“All these people had confirmed to her, your evidence is clear, your case is solid, so why the reversal?”

They weren't saying, "We can't tell you because we're not supposed to tell you or we can't tell you because we don't even know." We can't tell you anything else. I don't know which one it was. And so I try to come up with some other questions, but if they're saying, "That's the main question I have is why, and is this appealing?" You know, is there anybody else, could I talk to a manager? You know, it felt like that of are you sure? Like, this is something you all have been working on for almost three years.

I believe at that point. And I said, "Well, can I have the case file?"

And I got an answer that was basically how you would answer any typical four-year request.

She was floored. Because I'm essentially losing my attorneys, I feel like, after I had struggled so much to find somebody to represent me, I thought that I had the best attorneys who were available in America to work on this case.

“I mean, who better to get? And I think at that point, I went home for the day and just cried.”

It was just, I was devastated. I felt like something died. So why did they drop it, exactly? I put this question to Jen Swedish. She was a manager in the employment litigation section at the time. Four other cases in her section had been dropped, but Christie's had lingered for seven more weeks.

When it finally died, Jen Swedish told me the attorneys working on it were confused to say the least.

Under Trump one, a case like this would have been fine, she said. So I asked her, "What happened?" What was the reason that the higher-ups gave? I believe that's probably protected by a privilege, and I don't know that I can share it, unfortunately. Whatever the reason they did give that I understand you're not proper for you to articulate right now. Did you buy it?

One was the, what they said. I think what they said was a superficial excuse that was bullshit.

“And what actually happened behind the scenes is the real reason.”

I don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes. The most I can say, from talking to a couple of people from the DOJ side, is that there seem to have been a directive from on high. Someone high up in the Mississippi AG's office, maybe, who contacted someone high up in the DOJ. And that that directive got passed down to the bosses in the Employment Litigation section, drop it today. I found a slew of FOIA requests with DOJ and Mississippi officials to try to figure it out, but nothing I got in return clarified why this one went down.

Both the DOJ and the Mississippi AG's office declined my requests for comment. Gen was pretty measured in our conversation, so I couldn't tell where they upset when they found out they had to drop it. All right, so you didn't have, like, nobody came to your office being live with the fuck. About this case. Oh, no, they did. Oh, they did. Oh, they did. Oh, there's so much emotion about this case in my, really, absolutely.

Oh, everyone was so, everyone who was aware of what was happening with this case was really upset about it.

“But what is, was there something about this one in particular or, or no?”

I think I, I think, you know, compared to other cases, I mean, this is a very strong case. So to see a very strong case involving a black woman who was discriminated against. It rang through to us that this administration wouldn't care about vindicating her rights, which is really upsetting. One person told me, Christy's case wasn't just a strong case. It was the strongest paid discrimination case they'd had in years. Having to dismiss it, let her to quit the DOJ.

I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know you could disappear a federal case like this without a defensible reason. An honorable people can disagree type of reason. But if it's true that the new civil rights bosses weren't making a decision based on the evidence and the law, then I'm not sure how else to interpret this, except that they were making a decision based on the color of Christy's skin.

When the DOJ first took up Christy's case, she'd heard from all these other women,

most all black women, not only in Mississippi but from all over the place, who had similar stories of unfairness, of being paid less or treated worse, exponents of her own outrage. Now that her case was dropped, the messages came again. I started getting what I'm going to call condolence messages from friends, classmates who were aware of the lawsuit being failed on my behalf. And that made it worse because I felt like I was letting all of these people down who were rooting for me.

After a couple of weeks, she rallied.

And I just, I finally realized, well, I didn't dismiss my case, right?

I didn't quit. They quit all me for whatever reason. And I've got to figure out something else. Within a month, Christy had found a private law firm to file a new Title VII lawsuit. She's not giving up.

“She has other updates too. Her private life is good. She's reconnected with her stepchildren and they're doing great.”

She's working as an attorney for the Mississippi Department of Health. I review contracts for communicable diseases. Attie for health administration, epidemiology. It's very boring. It's okay, though.

It's not okay. Christy Metcalf is rare. An optimistic person, a can-do person who is also not naive. She knows history. She knows how things tend to shake out in this country for black women from rural Alabama.

And the idea that even if you have to work twice as hard, it's worth it.

An idea a lot of us rely on. Take that belief away. What are you left with? Sorry, you're saying you've just stopped trying as hard. Is that what you mean?

“I hate to admit that, but that's what it is.”

Yeah. Because you have a little bit lost faith in the notion of a reward for hard work. Yes. For now, at least, the Mississippi State Senate doesn't have to change its hiring or pay practices. Discriminatory or not.

Looking back at that list of cases where I first saw Christy's lawsuit, the same as true all over the country.

The South Bend Indiana Police Department, the Maryland State Police, the fire departments in Durham, North Carolina, and Cobb County, Georgia, all employment cases that the DOJ has disavowed or dropped.

“In cases regarding alleged workplace discrimination against transgender people, definitely not.”

Hotel chain in New York. Wendy's franchise in Florida, lush cosmetics, a pig farming operation in Illinois, a pizza place at O'Hare, Culver's restaurants in Michigan, all places where the EEOC initially found title seven violations prior to Trump's election.

Most election, the EEOC backed away from every single one.

When I talked to Jen Swedish, she told me she'd been one of 10 people on the Employment Litigation Management team for the Civil Rights Division. Soon after she left, there was only one person left on that team. In late December of 2024, the section had between 30 and 40 trial attorneys on staff. By the end of last year, there were 11. And that's just employment litigation, voting, housing, disability rights, by all accounts, the whole Civil Rights Division has been gutted.

The latest number I saw was that about 75% of the DOJ civil rights attorneys are gone. Christy Metcalf's personal discrimination lawsuit, the one she filed last year on her own in federal court, as of right now, the case has been stayed, meaning it's on hold. Pending a decision on emotion filed by lawyers for the Mississippi State Senate, they're asking the judge to dismiss the whole thing. That was Sarah Canick of serial productions. Make sure to catch cereals new show the idiot from writer M. Gesson.

It'll be out later this month. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to note today.”

A Senate vote to reopen the Department of Homeland Security failed on Thursday, as Democrats continue to refuse backing a funding bill without significant new restrictions on federal immigration officers. Thousands of federal workers have gone without paychecks since the shutdown began on February 14, including a TSA. With experts warning that scatter backups and airport security around the country could become more frequent. Board of Control and Immigration Enforcement agencies, meanwhile, are operating with money approved separately by Republicans last year.

And a driver ran to truck into a synagogue outside Detroit on Thursday, raising further along about rising anti-Semitism in America. Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County said the suspect drove through the doors and down the hall of Temple Israel and West Bloomfield Township. A fire started in the building and the sheriff described video footage that showed the attacker "travelling with purpose" through the hallway. The attacker died after an exchange of gunfire with security guards. The 140 students at the synagogue's preschool were on her, according to Temple Israel officials.

Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Lindsey Garrison, with help from Michael Simon Johnson and Muge Sadie. It was edited by Ben Calhoun and Devon Taylor, with help from Rob Zipco, fact checked by Caitlyn Love. Contains music by Mary and Lizano, Sophia Landman, Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Diane Wang, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Julie Snyder, Daniel Gimet, Allemann Sumar, Jackson Bush, Stacy Young, Kirsten Noise, and Jessica Weisberg.