Prominent NC doc says she was fired after taking leave for sick child. She wants $10M.
A decade ago, and to much fanfare, Dr. Courtney Stephenson brought a rare prenatal surgical procedure to Charlotte and the Southeast designed to save the lives of endangered twins.
But in 2019, when the maternal-fetal medicine specialist needed a month off to care for her own child, Stephenson says her bosses at Atrium Health pressured her to stay at work, subjected her to months of mounting harassment, and suspended her hospital privileges. Eventually, they fired her.
Two years later, a new lawsuit makes it clear that the prominent Charlotte-area physician expects to be reimbursed for the “barrage of retaliatory action” she says she endured.
Stephenson doesn’t intend to come cheap: She is seeking damages of $10 million.
Her complaint against Atrium, the Carolinas Physicians Network, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority alleges violations of Stephenson’s rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, discrimination and retaliation, breach of contract, as well as intentional and negligent infliction of emotional stress, among other claims.
In a statement to the Observer, Atrium disputed Stephenson’s allegations, asserting that “the facts differ significantly from what is described in the lawsuit.”
“Atrium Health appreciates Dr. Stephenson’s years of service. The reasons we discontinued our relationship with Dr. Stephenson well over a year ago were and are known to her and have been thoroughly explained to her legal counsel. Atrium Health’s decision was entirely legal and appropriate and was not in any way related to her FMLA allegations,” the Charlotte-based hospital system said.
The hospital said it supports its employees’ rights, including Stephenson’s, to take medical leave to care for themselves or their family. “We regret Dr. Stephenson has chosen to initiate this lawsuit, but we will defend the decision we made.”
Hirings and firings at the state’s largest health care provider, with 42 hospitals, 1,500 treatment locations and more than 70,000 employees, take place unnoticed every day.
Now, Stephenson and her attorneys, which include Cate Edwards, the daughter and law partner of former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, are taking her termination public.
Edwards told the Observer on Wednesday that Stephenson’s lawsuit drips with irony.
“Dr. Stephenson spent her entire career saving other people’s babies with life-saving surgeries. There are babies all over North Carolina and the Southeast who would not be alive without her care,” Edwards said.
“But when she had to take a leave of absence to care for her own child, she was met with retaliation and ultimately fired. That’s wrong. It’s also illegal.”
At the center of the complaint is a dispute over what’s commonly known as the FMLA. The federal law guarantees up to 12 weeks of annual leave to employees for, among other reasons, “to care for the employee’s spouse, child, or parent who has a serious health condition.”
Veteran Charlotte employment law attorney Julie Fosbinder says such disputes are not uncommon and most often involve female employees who claim discrimination when they are disciplined or even fired for taking protected leave.
Stephenson’s FMLA requests
Stephenson had been caring for her patients’ children in Charlotte since 2004, when she was hired by Carolinas Medical Center — later Atrium Health — as a doctor of maternal-fetal medicine, an arm of obstetrical care focused on high-risk pregnancies.
While seeing her patients in Charlotte, she also received training in Cincinnati for a new surgical procedure to correct a potentially fatal prenatal abnormality known as ‘twin-twin transfusion syndrome.”
The condition, which strikes about 15 percent of pregnancies of identical twins, occurs when one of the babies receives too much blood and amniotic fluid while the other receives too little and basically starves in its mother’s womb.
Stephenson, the subject of front-page stories in the Observer at the time, brought the procedure to CMC in 2010, the same year she became head of the hospital’s Charlotte Fetal Care Center, a position she held until her firing almost a decade later. According to the lawsuit, the center remains the only medical facility in the Southeast that performs inter-uterine surgery to treat twin-twin syndrome.
According to the complaint, Stephenson’s standing at Atrium changed dramatically based on a routine meeting.
In May 2019, the single mother of two daughters learned that one of her children had suffered a relapse of an unidentified condition that required “immediate and constant care from her mother,” the lawsuit says.
On May 30, according to the complaint, Stephenson met with her superiors to discuss taking a 30-day FMLA break that had been recommended by her daughter’s doctor. That would be followed by intermittent FMLA leave over the next six months aligning with her daughter’s treatment.
According to the lawsuit, one of Stephenson’s bosses immediately pushed back, even suggesting a different strategy for treating the child that would not require Stephenson to miss work.
The next day, Stephenson formally applied for both the 30-day and intermittent leaves. The former began that June 6. As part of the arrangement, Stephenson agreed to keep meeting with patients who could not be seen by other maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) physicians.
A week into her leave — while Stephenson was at an appointment tied to her daughter’s medical treatment — she received a message from her two bosses demanding that she to come to work for a meeting as soon as possible, the lawsuit says.
During the meeting, one of the superiors said Stephenson’s MFM colleagues were complaining about her “unfair” leave. Her bosses also accused her of “dumping her responsibilities on her partners” and not taking the FMLA leave correctly, the lawsuit says.
Stephenson was also accused of “providing a patient with substandard care” several weeks before, despite what the lawsuit asserts was a “extremely successful procedure” that she had thoroughly discussed with the patient and other experts in fetal surgery.
Nonetheless, the lawsuit claims that her superiors lodged a “quality action” against her, the first discipline she’d received over the treatment of a patient in her 15 years with the hospital system.
According to the complaint, the retaliatory treatment escalated after her month of leave ended and she returned to work. In August, the lawsuit says, Stephenson’s two superiors falsely accused her of performing and “unapproved” surgical procedure and later “abandoning a patient.”
In early August, according to the complaint, the hospital revoked both her MFM and hospital privileges. Even though she could no longer see patients, she was ordered to be at work every day.
The paper trail of Stephenson’s purported violations continued to grow. At one point, according to the lawsuit, she was informed that other MFM doctors would stop looking in on her hospitalized patients, a change in longstanding practice that would have required Stephenson, in some instances, to work seven days a week.
The change was rescinded in October after Stephenson complained to Atrium’s human resources department.
Stephenson was fired a month later. According to the lawsuit, the Charlotte Fetal Care Center immediately was shut down.
Stephenson has since joined the staff of Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill.
