The Daily - The Case of Kristie Metcalfe

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department — founded to focus on fighting race-based discrimination — has drastically changed the kinds of cases it pursues, dropping or setting aside many already in progress. Sarah Koenig from Serial Productions tells the story of Kristie Metcalfe — her civil rights case and how it was squandered. Guest: Sarah Koenig, podcast host and producer for The New York Times’ Serial Productions. Background reading: The Trump administration upended 60 years of civil rights in two months. Photo: Imani Khayyam for The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Koenig from serial productions to tell you the story of one woman whose 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 as clear a 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 lawyering. It's the unsung kind of lawyering. Christy Metcalfe 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 explained to the senators what the Mississippi Constitution said, what the U.S. 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, the question that is hard to, maybe to answer, but were you good at it? Like, were you good at it? Yes. Yes. Yes. No, that's not. I love that question because here's the thing.

I come from super middle class backgrounds. Uh-huh. 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 ipsa loquiter to a lay person. Like, they don't care. Like, what are you talking about?

This Latin stuff. Like, that doesn't mean anything to me. Yeah. I mean, I got two degrees. I got a law degree. I don't know what it means when you say notwithstanding as provided in. Yeah.

No, in every piece of legislation that I drafted at the request of a senator, I tried to do it in a way with my mom and mine. Can this licensed cosmetologist 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. Christy grew up in rural Alabama, as she mentioned, super middle class background. Her mom worked in a manufacturing plant and later got a cosmetology license and opened the only black-owned salon in Lamar County. Her dad worked at a company that made forklift parts. She watched her many siblings go to college, then go to college, then go to 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 scrimped 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 Magna Cum Laude into an economy still limping from recession. The law firms she'd clerked out over the summer, weren't hiring. She had nothing lined up. Her prospects were not looking good. But Christy is not someone who folds. One day, the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court came to speak at Ole Miss. And Christy took a chance. After his talk, she marched up to him and asked for a clerk position. The Chief Justice. That is so ballsy. Am I allowed to say ballsy? Like, that's really, wow, okay.

And I was just, that was where I was in my life. I was like, I can't let this fail. And the Chief Justice hired her. Christy loved that job. Year 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 a Senate attorney, I didn't know that was a job.

In undergrad, Christy had double majored 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 I was like, oh, this is perfect. You know, can I go do this job? Yes, she could, was the answer. Especially since there hadn't been a black attorney at the Senate for decades.

and the Black Caucus had been agitating to rectify that. The Senate hired young Christy 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 more. This is great. And I negotiated for higher than we,

what they offered me initially. And 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 is be like, uh-uh, I'm worth more than that.

I would like some more. You actually did it. Yes, yes. I negotiated for more, and I thought I was really doing something. Well, you were. I had no idea I'm negotiating like 20,000 less than I should be negotiating. Like they said 52 and you should have been like, how about 95? Right, right. Exactly.

Exactly. Because that is one. what the next lowest salaries were in her same office, 95,500, which a month later got bumped 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 adage in a lot of black households. It's something that I remember from even being in 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. But I feel like for me, for my siblings, it has been twice as hard to get just as far. 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 be. I am supposed to. 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 fight are 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 aided 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. In 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 on her she was, what had happened on Game of Thrones, and can someone hand me my bag? 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, a 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 aware 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 salary is 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 Christy 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 Christy. $24,000 more. His salary would be $101,500. This was Christy'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, a guy named Terry Burton. They tossed out a bunch of reasons why the new higher salary was going to be higher than hers. Well, he's highly qualified.

He went to a top ten law school. He did, UVA. 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 20 years. And he had a Ph.D. Yes, they 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, Christy'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 quell 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, Christy 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, Patristic Theology and the Ethics of Humanity's Relationship with Animal Creation. And yes, he had gotten his law degree eight years earlier than Christy,

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 it operated before, wasn't it? I mean, the whole time you're being paid 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, had 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 Christy remembered saying stuff like, Well, my grandmother used to call black women negresses. She just had a knack for saying, were these were people in my family who said the N-word, 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 who's 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 to complain 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 unsuccessfully. 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 description. I thought this was something else, but I'm seeing it now?

Or did you know, did you feel like that all along? You're like, they're doing this to me because I'm a black woman and they feel like they can. I felt like it somewhat before, but it became very apparent when they hired a white male and paid him $24,000 more than what I was being paid. 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 longtime Senate attorney named Larry Richardson.

I explained to Larry how in the beginning, the huge pay discrepancy made sense to Christy. She said, well, I was told it was all based on seniority. 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 his unfair pay for Senate staff. He said the seniority thing, that's BS.

The best way to describe the salaries to handle in the legislature. It's just haphazard. It's all subjective, 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 Christie'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. You see the problem. And then to hire the new guy for way more money, he said he was flabbergasted when he saw that. There was 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 her. I never heard any complaints, and I would have heard them.

But no, I never heard any complaints about her work. But you also didn't hear any gossip or something of that new girl is really a pain in the bus. or something. No one was talking. She did the job, Larry said, and people seemed 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 he offered a general assessment. The Senate, the Senate just historically

has been white. 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. Christie 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 that in their collective Senate heart,

anyone thought this pay 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. 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 filed that, I filed that complaint.

After the break, Sarah Kahnig returns with the rest of Christy's story. Once Christy Metcalf 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 than it'd get me to shut up about it.

Instead, as the EEOC investigated, the Mississippi Senate dug in. They never claimed Christie 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, quote, 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. Metcalf contends that there is direct

evidence, et cetera. Meanwhile, working at the Senate was becoming intolerable. She and her fellow attorneys that 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 filed 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. In the past, you might offer to pitch in and 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, a two-and-a-half drive each way.

Christy'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 combed through the documentation. What they were looking for, in part, is whether they can find any non-discriminatory reason

to explain the disparity in Christie's pay. Seniority say, that's a valid non-discriminatory reason. Or lesser qualifications, or lousy job performance. They could not find any thing. About two years after she filed her claim, the EEOC made its determination, and it sided with Christie. The EEOC said there was, quote, 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'd agree to stop discriminating.

And they'd need to develop and implement policies prohibiting retaliation. and trained staff on those policies, and they need to pay Christy more than $200,000 in backpay 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 emotional stress that the Senate's pay discrimination caused has wrecked my life. 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 I had... 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 clean the units before showing them to prospective renters. When she thinks of it now, cat shit comes to mind. She eventually started managing the place in exchange for discounted rent, the hardest job of her life, she said. When she finally got an attorney position, it was at 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 Christy's case. So the EEOC called it. quits, pass the case along to the Department of Justice, saying, essentially, we think there's been discrimination here. Do what you will. Christy'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 Christy'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 Christy 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 cat shit and the child abuse evidence you can't unsee, I asked Christy, dumbly, do you remember when you got the news?

What was that like? I remember. I thought it was such a huge wind for just... For me, but more importantly for the other women who worked for 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 is 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 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 v. 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 Christy'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 Christy's case.

A DOJ trial attorney named Lewis Witsett explained all this to Christy. 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. Christy's case was filed November 8th, 2024, just a few days after Donald Trump won the presidential election. Over the next couple months, the Mississippi AG's office slow rolled, asking for extensions to respond to the DOJ complaint, like they saw where all this was going before the DOJ lawyers did. 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 stayed for now?

And Lewis Witsitt from the Civil Rights Division was saying repeatedly, no, it's not. There's no stay. Yes, the new bosses were reviewing Christy'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. It was 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, seemed safe. Until suddenly, it wasn't. Early last year,

Christy got a call from the DOJ attorneys. The case was being stayed. Christy 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, well, we just talked not too long ago, and you told me that there was a stay issued.

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 pass muster 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, Christy 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. Okay. 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 appealable? You know, is there anybody else? Can 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 foul? and I got an answer that was basically how you would answer any typical FOIA 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 won, 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 it's not proper for you to articulate right now, did you buy it? There were two reasons that I think would have both been possible for the front office to tell us as to why they wanted the case dismissed. 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 seemed 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 filed 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 decline my requests for comment. Jen was pretty measured in our conversation, so I couldn't tell. Were 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 like, what 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 whole office. Really? Absolutely. Oh, everyone was so, everyone who was aware of what was happening with this case. was really upset about it. But was there something about this one in particular or no? I think I've, 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 true 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 pay 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,

almost 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 weeks, she rallied. And I just, I found it. finally realized, well, I didn't dismiss my case. Right. I didn't quit. They quit on 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, IT for health administration, epidemiology. Okay. Yeah. It's very boring.

I'm sorry. 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 yet she's not a cynic. She's a believer in hard work. 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 of way. What are you left with? Sorry, you're saying you've kind of just like, stop trying as hard. Is that what you mean?

I hate to admit that, but that's what it, yeah. Because you've 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 is 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. And cases regarding alleged workplace discrimination against transgender people, definitely not. A hotel chain in New York. A 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 VII violations prior to Trump's election. Post-election, the EEOC backed away from every single one. When I talked to Jen Swedish, she told me she'd been one of ten 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's 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 a motion filed by lawyers for the Mississippi State Senate,

they're asking the judge to dismiss the whole thing. That was Sarah Kainig of serial productions. Make sure to catch Serial's new show The Idiot from writer M. Gessen. It'll be out later this month. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A Senate vote to reopen.

in the Department of Homeland Security failed on Thursday, as Democrats continued 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 at TSA, with experts warning that scattered backups at airport security around the country could become more frequent. Border control and immigration enforcement agencies, meanwhile, are operating with money approved separately by Republicans last year. And a driver rammed a truck into a synagogue outside Detroit on Thursday, raising further alarm 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, quote, traveling with purpose through the hallway. The attacker died after an exchange of guns. fire with security guards. The 140 students at the synagogues preschool were unhurt, according to Temple Israel officials. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Lindsay Garrison, with help from Michael Simon Johnson and Muj Sadie.

It was edited by Ben Calhoun and Devin Taylor, with help from Rob Zipko. Fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Contains music by Marion Lazzano, Sophia Landman, Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Julie Snyder, Daniel Gimette, Alamann Sumar, Jackson Bush, Stacey Young, Kirsten Noyes, and Jessica Weisberg. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you on Sunday.