Goldman Sachs Group and its former female employees who sued the company in one of Wall Street’s biggest gender discrimination lawsuits are sparring over whether names of two senior executives mentioned in internal complaints should be exposed.
A Goldman Sachs lawyer on Wednesday urged a New York federal judge to reject the women’s request to disclose the parts of court records containing names of the executives, including one currently employed by the bank, who “were subjects of hearsay internal complaints” almost two decades ago.
“Such disclosure would serve only to sensationalize this case and infringe on the substantial privacy interests of third parties for no compelling reason,” the bank’s lawyer Robert Giuffra said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres. The two executives are not defendants in the suit, Giuffra wrote.
The letter follows a request from the women last week for the disclosure of passages in filings related to their bid for class-action status, in light of giving the public access to information.
“First Amendment rights attach to the names of high-ranking alleged sexual harassers identified at class certification,” Kelly Dermody, who is representing the plaintiffs, said in a letter to Torres on May 24.
Cristina Chen-Oster, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, first filed a complaint against the bank with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2005, then sued five years later. The suit, which won class-action status in 2018, covers thousands of women and looms large on Wall Street, where the largest U.S. banks have men at the helm.
The company let its managers make biased pay and promotion decisions that systematically denied women opportunities they deserved, the women claim.
The internal complaints “have nothing to do with the certified claims in this case involving three evaluation and promotion processes,” Giuffra said. “At best, these complaints relate to so-called ‘boys’ club’ allegations that the court held were not suitable for class treatment.”
Over a year ago, plaintiffs agreed not to publish the executives’ names but only disclose their titles at the time the complaints were made but have now done an “about-face,” Giuffra said in the letter.
The case is Chen-Oster v Goldman Sachs Group Inc., 10-cv-6950, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
