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223 A.D.2d 392

Steadman v. Sinclair

Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York · decided 1996-01-16

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1996-01-16

How this case has been cited

Cited by 48 later decisions — most recently January 2019 · most notably 16 F. Supp. 2d 414 - Ponticelli v. Zurich American Insurance Group (1998), 44 F. Supp. 2d 593 - Hicks v. IBM (1999)

220199620002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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¶1Order, Supreme Court, New York County (Elliott Wilk, J.), entered March 1, 1995, which granted defendant’s motion to dismiss the complaint and amend his answer to plead counterclaims, unanimously affirmed, without costs.

¶2We agree with the IAS Court that the letter defendant wrote to the general manager of his employer complaining about *393plaintiffs racism in relation to his employment, and expressing outrage, humiliation, pain, and the hope that the recipient of the letter would correct these "ongoing injustices”, are non-actionable expressions of opinion (see, Polish Am. Immigration Relief Comm. v Relax, 189 AD2d 370; Parks v Steinbrenner, 131 AD2d 60). Defendant’s counterclaims alleging that the instant action was instigated by defendant’s employer in retaliation for the complaint defendant filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and seeking to hold plaintiffs individually liable as aiders and abettors of such retaliation under Executive Law § 296 (6), have support in our recent case law holding that "an individual may be held liable for aiding discriminatory conduct” (Peck v Sony Music Corp., 221 AD2d 157; see also, Tomka v Seiler Corp., 66 F3d 1295, 1317 [2d Cir 1995]). Our prior affirmance of an order dismissing counterclaims alleging similar facts did not assert that the liability of the individual plaintiffs was being predicated upon an aiding and abetting theory (203 AD2d 92). The amended counterclaims do clearly set forth the required element of aiding and abetting the employer’s retaliatory act of instigating this lawsuit. Concur—Ellerin, J. P., Ross, Nardelli, Williams and Mazzarelli, JJ.

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