Background
Jameka Eleazer, a Black woman, began working for Oracle America in February 2019 as a Business Development Consultant, identifying sales opportunities for colleagues responsible for closing deals. Oracle promoted her to Application Sales Representative in July 2020. In that role, she sold new products and product expansions to existing clients and became responsible for sales-attainment and pipeline-generation quotas and performance indicators involving calls, emails, meetings, and product demonstrations.
Nicole Levitt gave Eleazer “needs improvement” ratings in all three categories of her fiscal-year 2022 review, noting 62% annual sales attainment and concerns about urgency and proactive engagement. Eleazer’s self-assessment rated her performance as exceeding expectations. Garrett Miller became her first-level supervisor in June 2022 and documented missed deadlines, untimely work, lack of urgency, and difficulty driving sales without substantial assistance. Eleazer accused Miller of micromanagement, unauthorized changes to her deals and forecasts, and unprofessional and unethical conduct.
After performance meetings and consultations with Levitt and human-resources partner Denise Choi, Miller issued Eleazer a performance improvement plan on March 29, 2023. The plan identified deficiencies in attainment, pipeline and forecasting, and completion of daily tasks, and warned that continued failure to improve could result in termination. Choi concluded that Eleazer had identified nothing improper in the plan or Miller’s handling of the matter. Levitt and Miller terminated Eleazer effective June 1, 2023.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Oracle on Eleazer’s federal and Texas race-discrimination claims and, separately, on her retaliation claim. Reviewing de novo, the court analyzed Title VII and Chapter 21 of the Texas Labor Code together because their substantive standards are identical. The first three prima facie elements were undisputed; the dispositive issue was whether Eleazer identified a similarly situated non-Black employee treated more favorably under nearly identical circumstances.
Eleazer proposed the five other employees supervised by Miller, all of whom were white. The court found no competent summary-judgment evidence that their conduct and circumstances were nearly identical to hers. Oracle’s evidence showed that Eleazer had the team’s lowest fiscal-year 2023 sales attainment and pipeline generation, at 37% and 24%, respectively. She also averaged 56 calls and 20 emails weekly during the first three quarters, below expectations of 100 calls and 25 emails. Even crediting her contention that termination shortly before a deal closed depressed her attainment, the court calculated that she would have reached 50%, still second lowest and fourteen percentage points behind fourth place. Her assertion that Miller adjusted her pipeline figures downward likewise lacked evidence that colleagues were treated differently and did not address the other performance deficiencies.
The court also treated Eleazer’s PIP history as dispositive: she supplied no evidence that any proposed comparator had received a similar PIP, and the record showed Miller had not previously placed anyone else on one. The only employee identified with a comparable PIP history, a Hispanic employee nicknamed “VP,” was also terminated. That employee therefore was not treated more favorably than Eleazer. The court rejected her characterization of VP’s termination as further evidence of bias as an unsubstantiated assertion insufficient to defeat summary judgment.
The retaliation claim failed on the distinct ground of administrative exhaustion. Eleazer’s June 2023 EEOC intake inquiry mentioned retaliation, but her September 17, 2023 formal charge neither checked the retaliation box nor described retaliation or protected activity that provoked it. The intake form was unsigned and unverified, could not independently constitute a charge, and was not shown to have been appended to or incorporated into the formal charge. The court therefore found no genuine factual dispute that retaliation was unexhausted. It did not decide whether the formal charge’s naming of Oracle Corp., rather than subsidiary Oracle America, created a separate exhaustion problem: Oracle forfeited that entity-specific objection by not raising it in the district court. The court emphasized that Title VII’s charge-filing requirements are nonjurisdictional and forfeitable, not that every such defect is invariably waived.
Key Takeaways
- Proposed comparators must have nearly identical conduct and circumstances; materially worse performance and a unique PIP history defeated Eleazer’s comparison to her teammates.
- Even accepting Eleazer’s arguments about a pending sale and altered pipeline figures, the record did not establish performance comparable to employees who were treated more favorably.
- An unverified intake questionnaire mentioning retaliation did not exhaust that claim when the formal charge omitted retaliation and the questionnaire was not incorporated into it.
- The separate Oracle Corp./Oracle America exhaustion issue was forfeited in this case because Oracle failed to raise it below.
Why It Matters
The unpublished, per curiam decision illustrates the Fifth Circuit’s demanding comparator analysis at summary judgment. Shared race, job team, and supervisor are insufficient where the employer documents meaningful differences in sales results, activity metrics, proactivity, and disciplinary history. The opinion also shows why courts may credit a plaintiff’s factual assertions yet still find them inadequate to establish nearly identical circumstances.
For retaliation litigation, the decision underscores the practical importance of the formal EEOC charge and its verification and incorporation requirements. Checking retaliation on an initial intake inquiry alone did not preserve the claim here. At the same time, the forfeiture discussion is circumstance-specific: the court declined to address the corporate-entity discrepancy because Oracle had not timely raised it, rather than announcing that such discrepancies can never affect exhaustion.