A former civil rights investigator at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who was diagnosed with cancer three weeks after she was hired, claims in a federal discrimination lawsuit that she was fired for not being productive enough while undergoing physically taxing treatment for the disease.
She also claims her supervisors did not agree with how she credibly assessed a sexual harassment complaint by a graduate student against a GSU professor, and retaliated against her for it.
Cindy Hawthorne was hired as an assistant director of equity and civil rights compliance at GSU in October 2023, charged with investigating employee and student complaints of violations of federal civil rights laws and campus conduct rules.
Only a few weeks into her new job, she learned that she had cancer and faced a protracted battle with the disease, including surgery and an ongoing regimen of chemotherapy.
Despite the “devastating diagnosis,” Hawthorne continued to work and delayed her surgery until December 2023 to avoid an immediate staffing gap in her department, according to her lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on March 10 (and obtained by Atlanta Black Star).
Her supervisors initially reacted to her medical crisis with compassion, offering a series of accommodations, including a month of leave, remote work, and a shift to a seven-day flex schedule to accommodate her transition to chemotherapy and the physical toll the treatments took on her, the complaint says. She also got excused time off for medical appointments.
In March 2024, her accommodations were approved through May 2024, but in the interim, senior leadership in the Equity and Civil Rights Compliance Unit began holding internal meetings about replacing Hawthorne, in part over concerns about her delayed pace in completing work projects since her return from medical leave.
Meanwhile, that spring, Hawthorne investigated a female graduate research assistant’s allegations of sexual harassment against her supervising professor in the life sciences department. Hawthorne found the allegations, backed by substantial detail and corroborating evidence, merited a full-fledged Title IX (gender discrimination) inquiry and advised that the university might also be exposed to Title VII (employment-related civil rights) liability.
Her supervisor, Chris Griffin, the department director and GSU’s Title IX coordinator, challenged those findings and directed her to rewrite her report regarding the outcome of the harassment investigation in April 2024, the lawsuit says. The executive director of the Civil Rights Compliance Unit, Kieran Morrow, also questioned the credibility of the grad student’s allegations.
Though she had received positive feedback and a high score on an evaluation after her first three months on the job, and says her work was regularly praised by Griffin, by mid-April Griffin was advising her that Morrow had developed concerns about her job performance.
On May 3, 2024, two days after her disability accommodation plan expired, and less than 10 days after she was ordered to change her investigative findings regarding the alleged student harassment, Hawthorne was put on a 90-day performance improvement plan (PIP) and allegedly told that her next investigative report would determine whether she would remain employed.
Hawthorne took that as a warning that she needed to be more cautious about recommending liability for the university in situations where department leadership was skeptical of her assessment, the lawsuit says.
The PIP criticized her productivity and the time it took Hawthorne to complete investigative interviews and reports, not acknowledging her accommodations plan allowed for extended project deadlines. The PIP specifically mentioned that she was out on sick leave for a week after being asked to schedule a round of witness interviews.
The improvement plan also discussed the sexual harassment investigation and admonished Hawthorne for “failing to adequately assess relevance or to properly weigh contested facts.”
Over the summer of 2024, Hawthorne sought to renew her accommodations while Griffin asked her several times if she was able to return to a hybrid in-office schedule. During one progress review meeting, Griffin allegedly told her she was “not pulling her weight.”
GSU extended her accommodations on Aug. 7. On Aug. 9, when her performance improvement plan was set to expire, Griffin extended it for 30 days solely on the grounds that Hawthorne had inserted an inapplicable paragraph from a template into a draft report, the complaint says.
Hawthorne then had a six-week round of radiation treatment and experienced stress-related anxiety that required her to return to medical leave from Aug. 20 to Sept. 9, 2024. While out on leave, her PIP was extended to late September, since the medical leave had limited the time for her review.
While she was on the PIP, GSU hired someone else in her department, Hawthorne told WSB-TV.
“He kind of started letting me know about meetings that management was having without me, raises and offers that he was getting, and he understood that I was being pushed out,” said Hawthorne.
Two weeks after the improvement plan ended, on Oct. 10, 2024, Hawthorne was fired, ostensibly for failing to show sustained improvement under the PIP. The university said her termination was due to performance issues involving her “capacity to weigh evidence and legal standards and a lack of productivity,” according to a complaint she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in March of 2025.
GSU told the commission that the university had provided Hawthorne with generous accommodations and two periods of medical leave during her battle with cancer.
Artur Davis, Hawthorne’s attorney, told WSB that the new employee hired before she was fired testified about the university’s plan to replace Hawthorne during the EEOC investigation.
Hawthorne’s complaint contends that her supervisors did not adequately recognize “the inevitable slowdown in her production as she endured chemotherapy” and that GSU leaders “pressed her to resume a pace for which she wasn’t physically prepared,” twice extending the performance improvement plan when she sought to extend her workplace accommodations.
Her lawsuit claims she was terminated by GSU in violation of the federal Rehabilitation Act, which precludes discrimination based on a qualifying disability such as the physical and mental impact of her post-operative care, chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
She also claims that the university engaged in unlawful retaliation by taking adverse employment actions against her for the protected activity of opposing the gender-based harassment of a research assistant employed by GSU, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Her unwelcome investigative findings were “causally connected” to her placement on the performance improvement plan that eventually led to her termination, the lawsuit argues.
“I was just thrown away and lied to, to make it feel like it was my fault,” Hawthorne said.
Hawthorne seeks a jury trial to determine economic damages, including lost wages and benefits; compensatory damages, including for emotional pain and suffering, embarrassment and humiliation; punitive damages; and legal costs.
A spokesperson for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the named defendant in the lawsuit, told reporters that it does not comment on pending litigation.
As a government agency, the Board of Regents has 60 days after being served with the complaint to file a response in federal court.
Among possible defenses for the university system is the “undue hardship” provision of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), which says that an employer’s obligation to provide reasonable accommodations to a disabled employee can be limited if such modification would cause undue hardship, meaning significant difficulty or expense, on the employer. That includes reasonable accommodations that are “unduly extensive, substantial or disruptive.”
The law, which also applies to the Rehabilitation Act, says an employer must assess on a case-by-case basis whether a particular accommodation would cause undue hardship.
