TL;DR
- Who: Dr. Sari Edelman, a female rheumatologist employed by the NYU hospital system at its Lake Success, Long Island location from 2014 until her termination in December 2020.
- What happened: A male site director called her a gendered slur during a workplace dispute, she filed HR complaints about gender discrimination, and NYU fired her by refusing to renew her contract — one year later, almost to the day, using a secret “issues” log built specifically to justify her removal.
- The cover-up: HR notes from Edelman’s complaint were electronically altered nearly six months after the fact. HR manager Kathleen Pacina claimed she had no memory of a written complaint that used the phrase “male chauvinism” — a complaint she had received directly in writing.
- The jury verdict: A jury found NYU and Joseph Antonik liable for retaliation and awarded Edelman $700,000 in compensatory damages. A federal district court judge then threw the verdict out entirely.
- The appeals court ruling (June 18, 2025): The Second Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the district court’s decision, reinstated the $700,000 jury verdict against NYU and Antonik, and ordered a new trial on claims against David Kaplan.
- The institutions named: NYU Langone Health System, NYU Langone Hospitals, NYU Langone Medical Center, NYU Langone Nassau Rheumatology, NYU School of Medicine, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, NYU Hospitals Center, plus executives Andrew T. Rubin, David Kaplan, Joseph Antonik, and Joshua Swirnow — individually.
The internal email where Antonik orders his staff to find “recent examples of inappropriate behavior” against Edelman — one year after she filed her discrimination complaint — is reproduced in full in Legal Receipts. It is the smoking gun the district court tried to ignore.
She Reported Sexual Discrimination. They Built A Secret File To Fire Her.
Edelman v. NYU Langone et al. | Second Circuit Court of Appeals | Decided June 18, 2025
Dr. Sari Edelman spent nearly five years building a rheumatology practice inside one of the most powerful hospital systems in the United States. She saw patients, met her targets, renewed her contract, and kept her head down. Then one afternoon in September 2019, her site director walked into her office, told her NYU owned everything in it — including her — and called her a gendered slur under his breath. She filed a discrimination complaint the very next day. Fourteen months later, she was fired.
What happened in between is the story of a large institution doing what large institutions do when a woman speaks up: it did not address the complaint. It addressed the woman who made it. This investigation draws exclusively on the appellate record in Case No. 24-251-cv, Edelman v. NYU Langone Health System et al., decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on June 18, 2025. Every fact cited here is in that record.
The Timeline: From Complaint to Firing
Timeline of events from the appellate record: Edelman v. NYU Langone Health System et al., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025)
The Non-Financial Ledger: What A Verdict Cannot Restore
Dr. Sari Edelman walked into an NYU human resources office the morning after a man screamed at her, pointed at her belongings, told her she was owned, and called her a bitch. She walked in because she believed the process worked. She believed that a woman with five years of clean performance, a renewed contract, and a detailed account of what happened to her would receive a fair hearing. What she received instead was silence. Pacina, the HR manager who took her call, did not respond before the next incident happened. The next incident happened eight days later.
Consider what that silence communicates. Edelman filed a complaint on September 17. She received no response before September 25, when a second male supervisor interrupted her while she was with patients — mid-appointment, mid-care — and told her to calm down when she pushed back on his demands. She sent another email that night describing the condescension, the tone, the patronizing repetition of “Doctor, calm down, Doctor.” She sent a follow-up the next morning asking for an HR representative to be present at any further meetings. She did not receive a response until October 8. That response did not address the discrimination complaint at all. It addressed only the office space dispute, as if the two were the same thing — as if a gendered slur and a facilities scheduling disagreement were equivalent concerns that had now been resolved together.
Edelman persisted. On October 23, she followed up again, specifically asking about the status of her “complaint requesting investigation for workplace harassment.” No response. On November 1, she sent another email, spelling out in plain language that her complaint was “about treatment of females within workplace at NYU” and that the behavior of both Antonik and Kaplan was “abusive and bullying.” On November 5, Pacina finally responded — to say she thought “the matter was closed.” The matter was not closed. The matter had never been opened. No investigation had been conducted. No findings had been made. No one had spoken to Edelman about the substance of her complaints. What had happened, instead, was that the HR manager who took her complaint had passed it to the men Edelman was complaining about, and those men had begun building a file.
That file — titled, with all the subtlety of a confession, “Dr. Sari Edelman Issues” — was maintained by the office manager who reported directly to Antonik. Its first dated entry was November 13, 2019: one day after Edelman sent yet another follow-up email to HR. The appellate court noted plainly that “there is no evidence that such a log had ever been prepared before” for Edelman or, in any documented way, for any other doctor in the practice. Edelman had worked at NYU for over five years. No complaint against her had ever been logged. No performance issue had ever been formally raised. The log did not exist until the day after she reminded HR that her discrimination complaint was still open.
This is the texture of institutional retaliation that dollar amounts do not capture. It is the experience of filing a complaint and watching the people you complained about receive the complaint. It is sending five follow-up emails and receiving one dismissal. It is the knowledge that while you were asking HR whether your harassment complaint had been investigated, someone across the office was compiling a dossier on you. It is working for fourteen months under surveillance you did not know existed, performing your job, seeing your patients, while the case against you was being quietly constructed. It is the discovery, at trial, that the HR notes from your very first call had been electronically altered six months after the fact. It is watching an HR manager testify that she had no memory of an email that used the words “male chauvinism” — an email she had personally received, in writing, from you.
There is also the professional cost that no damages calculation reaches. The appellate record notes that Edelman and her longtime colleague Dr. Kavini Mehta had previously negotiated their contracts together. When contract renewal time came again, Edelman told Mehta they needed to negotiate separately — because she feared retaliation. She was right to fear it. NYU agreed to move forward with Mehta’s renewal negotiations. When Edelman reached out, Andrew Rubin — the Senior Vice President of Clinical Affairs — told her NYU would “let her know their plans.” The asymmetry was deliberate. One woman’s contract was renewed. The other woman’s contract became the subject of a year-long evidence-gathering operation designed to justify its non-renewal. The jury saw this. The jury reached a verdict. A district court judge then threw the verdict out. It took a federal appeals court to put it back.
— Dr. Sari Edelman, email to HR, November 1, 2019
Legal Receipts: What The Documents Actually Say
The following are verbatim quotations and direct factual statements from the appellate record in Edelman v. NYU Langone Health System et al., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025). Nothing below has been paraphrased. These are the words of witnesses, emails, internal documents, and the court itself.
“He started ‘flailing his arms’ and, pointing at items in Edelman’s office, said: ‘All of it belongs to NYU, this whole office. None of it’s yours. We – we own you.’ ‘During his rant [Antonik] uttered, under his breath, bitch.'” — Edelman’s trial testimony regarding the September 16, 2019, encounter with Joseph Antonik. App’x at 1206.
“My complaint was about the, the hostile and abusive behavior that had occurred the day before with [Antonik]; that I didn’t feel safe and I wanted it rectified; that I felt that it was a sexist, discriminatory, chauvinistic attack and it needed to be addressed with HR.” — Edelman describing her September 17, 2019, verbal HR complaint to Kathleen Pacina. App’x at 1210.
“[Pacina] wanted to discuss [Edelman’s complaint] with [Rose] before bringing it to leadership as it is about Joe Antanik.” — HR manager Kathleen Pacina, internal email to HR colleague Claudia Rose, regarding Edelman’s complaint. App’x at 2834.
“Edelman filed a complaint against Joe Antonik for being aggressive and retaliating for not allowing her to expand her hours.” — David Kaplan, email to Joshua Swirnow, describing his understanding of Edelman’s discrimination complaint after speaking with Pacina. App’x at 3229.
“As a female physician in the organization, I am disappointed that it is 2019, approaching 2020, in a major hospital organization in New York, and I still have to contend with male chauvinism. . . . It remains unclear to me why I am being discriminated against to accommodate another physician, particularly a male physician, who will be joining the practice, which is the stated reason I will be pushed out to another space. . . . This is the first time in all these years where I feel my growth as a physician is being deliberately infringed on by senior male managers.” — Dr. Sari Edelman, email to HR manager Kathleen Pacina, September 25, 2019. App’x at 1219.
“The harassment complaint was extensive detailed letter about treatment by manager using abusive and bullying behavior. While I spoke with Joshua Swirnow about the office space, I also was clear that the complaint was separate issue about treatment of females within workplace at NYU which is unacceptable moving into 2020. There was clearly implicit bias in how I was ‘managed’ and spoken to in a manner clearly not appropriate by Joe Antonik and David Kaplan.” — Dr. Sari Edelman, email to HR manager Kathleen Pacina, November 1, 2019. Supp. App’x at 280.
“David [Kaplan] requested all information on Edleman to be sent to him today. We need a clear, convincing summary with examples sent. . . . Ideally we want recent examples of inappropriate behavior and communicates between Edelman, staff and patients.” — Joseph Antonik, email to Dr. Andrew Porges and Miriam Ruiz, November 6, 2020 — nearly one year after Edelman’s first discrimination complaint. App’x at 2879.
“Edelman had worked at NYU for over five years at that point, and there is no evidence that such a log had ever been prepared before, or indeed that there had previously been any complaints against Edelman to log.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, discussing the “Dr. Sari Edelman Issues” spreadsheet. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025).
“Rubin testified that the information in that email was ‘the only thing that led to the nonrenewal’ of Edelman’s contract.” — Andrew Rubin, Senior Vice President of Clinical Affairs and Ambulatory Care, trial testimony. App’x at 1996.
“Rubin testified that Edelman ‘did not fit any of the for-cause definitions laid out in her contract.'” — Andrew Rubin, trial testimony. App’x at 1994.
“Pacina’s notes did not include Antonik’s use of the word ‘bitch,’ nor did they report that Edelman had asserted that she felt the encounter was sexist and chauvinistic. But Edelman testified that the notes did not reflect the entirety of her statements to Pacina. And Edelman cast doubt on whether Pacina’s notes were created or finalized contemporaneously with their September 17, 2019, conversation or whether they had been subsequently edited, because the notes were electronically marked as having been altered on March 13, 2020, almost six months after the fact.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025).
“Pacina denied any recollection of that email. . . . Edelman’s counsel asked Pacina: ‘But you still deny Dr. Edelman raised any complaint about gender discrimination; correct?’ Pacina responded: ‘Yes.'” — Trial testimony of HR manager Kathleen Pacina, after being shown Edelman’s September 25, 2019, written complaint. App’x at 2200, 2214.
“Antonik testified that he understood the nature of the complaint, and, in particular, that he knew it was not about office space, but ‘about the way that [he] spoke to her.’ Antonik admitted that he was ‘bothered by’ the complaint.” — Joseph Antonik, trial testimony. App’x at 1623.
“Antonik’s suspicious silence about purported patient care issues that one would expect to require prompt attention strongly suggests that his order to track such issues was motivated by retaliatory animus.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025).
“He did not interview Edelman, Antonik, Kaplan, or any of the staff members or patients identified as having made complaints about Edelman. He did not inquire about any human resources investigations involving Edelman and was therefore apparently unaware of the 2019 complaints.” — Second Circuit, describing Andrew Rubin’s “limited inquiry” before terminating Edelman. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025). App’x at 2030–2032.
“There is no dispute that the only basis for NYU’s termination of Edelman was the material that we have concluded is itself infected by the retaliatory motives of Antonik and Kaplan.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025).
“The jurors watched each of the relevant parties testify. They heard their statements and observed their demeanors. They alone were entitled to make credibility determinations. They were entitled to believe Edelman, and to discredit the testimony of Pacina and Antonik.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, explaining why the district court had no right to throw out the jury’s verdict. Edelman v. NYU Langone Health Sys., No. 24-251-cv (2d Cir. June 18, 2025).
Societal Impact Mapping
Environmental Degradation
The source record in this case does not contain evidence of direct environmental harm by NYU Langone. However, the institutional patterns documented here — a multi-billion-dollar hospital system that allocates significant resources to legal defense of documented retaliation, to maintaining HR infrastructure that protects supervisors rather than complainants, and to the suppression of internal accountability — represent a particular kind of institutional rot that has environmental correlates worth naming.
Large hospital systems are among the most resource-intensive institutions in the United States. NYU Langone operates across multiple campuses and employs thousands of workers. The governance failures on display in this case — a culture in which patient care concerns were apparently real enough to be catalogued in a spreadsheet but not urgent enough to be reported through the proper hotline until a contract was up for non-renewal — raise serious questions about whether the same institutional indifference that ignored Edelman’s complaints for months also shapes internal reporting cultures around waste, resource use, and patient safety. The appellate record notes explicitly that Antonik “never spoke to Edelman about any of the issues” in the log, and that he “took no steps to report those issues until Edelman’s contract was up for renewal.” If patient care concerns are weaponized as retroactive cover for retaliation, the integrity of patient care reporting systems at that institution is compromised. That is an environmental health concern in the broadest sense: it is about whether the institution’s systems for flagging harm actually function.
Public Health
Dr. Edelman was a practicing rheumatologist seeing patients. She was interrupted mid-appointment by a male supervisor who told her to give up office space. She was fired from an active practice. When experienced physicians are driven out of hospital systems through retaliation for gender discrimination complaints, their patient panels do not evaporate — they are redistributed, delayed, or lost. Rheumatology is a specialty already facing access shortages. Patients with autoimmune diseases, arthritis, and chronic inflammatory conditions rely on continuity of care. The loss of a physician who had built a five-year patient practice at a specific location is a direct public health event, even if it is rarely framed that way.
The appellate record also documents something with deeper public health implications: the behavior of HR at NYU Langone in this case suggests that the institution’s internal mechanisms for protecting employees who raise concerns about misconduct were, at minimum, dysfunctional. HR notes were altered six months after the fact. An HR manager testified under oath that she had no memory of a written complaint about gender discrimination that had been sent directly to her. The HR system was used to relay the content of Edelman’s complaints to the people she was complaining about. These are not accidental failures. They describe a system in which the protective function of HR had been effectively captured by institutional leadership. That matters for public health because the same HR apparatus that failed Edelman is the apparatus that hospital workers — nurses, residents, attending physicians, technicians — use to report patient safety concerns, unsafe working conditions, and workplace harassment. When workers see that the system does not protect those who speak up, they stop speaking up.
The appellate court also found that Rubin, in deciding to terminate Edelman, “did not interview Edelman, Antonik, Kaplan, or any of the staff members or patients identified as having made complaints about Edelman.” He did not review any HR investigations involving Edelman and was “apparently unaware of the 2019 complaints.” In other words: the executive who made the final call to end her career conducted no independent verification of the materials he was given. He accepted a file compiled by the men who had been the subject of Edelman’s discrimination complaints and used it as the “only” basis for his decision. This is institutional negligence with real consequences for the patients she was treating and for every other employee at that institution watching how the process works.
Economic Inequality
The structural economic dynamics in this case are not incidental to it — they are the architecture it runs on. NYU Langone is a massive, well-resourced institution. Dr. Edelman is an individual physician. The gap between those two parties in terms of legal resources, institutional leverage, and endurance capacity is enormous. Edelman filed her lawsuit in January 2021. The case went to trial in July 2023. The district court threw out the jury’s verdict after trial. The appeals court ruled in June 2025. This is more than four years of litigation — four years in which the plaintiff has had to sustain the financial and psychological costs of fighting a corporate defendant with essentially unlimited legal resources. The appellate record names two law firms on the defense side alone.
The Equal Pay Act claims in this case, while not upheld, illuminate a second dimension of economic inequality: the wage structure. Edelman presented evidence that Dr. Anang Modi, a male rheumatologist at the same practice, was paid more than she was. The court found that the jury was entitled to conclude the pay difference was justified by differences in experience, leadership credentials, and productivity targets — Modi’s annual production target was 6,100 relative value units (RVUs), placing him in the top ten percent of rheumatologists nationally, versus Edelman’s 5,200 RVU target. But note what those numbers encode. The RVU system, which governs physician compensation across medicine, measures “time and intensity required to provide a particular service.” It rewards volume and intensity of patient throughput. It structurally advantages physicians with fewer external constraints on their time. The system produces pay disparities that can be facially neutral while encoding the effects of a labor market that has historically undervalued the work of women in medicine and overloaded women with administrative and caregiving burdens that don’t generate RVUs.
There is also the economic dimension of the retaliation mechanism itself. Edelman’s employment contract specified that she could only be terminated “for cause.” The appellate court noted that Rubin himself testified she “did not fit any of the for-cause definitions laid out in her contract.” The institution could not fire her through the front door, so it built a case through the back: a year-long surveillance log, assembled by a subordinate with documented retaliatory animus, transmitted up the chain to a senior executive who asked no questions. The entire machinery of that operation — the log, the emails, the file assembled on November 6, 2020, the chain from Ruiz to Porges to Kaplan to Swirnow to Rubin — consumed institutional labor and resources. That machinery was pointed at one woman who had asked HR to investigate the men who ran her office. The economic message it sends to every other woman in that institution is precise and deliberate: the cost of speaking up is that the institution turns its resources against you.
The $700,000 jury verdict — reinstated by the Second Circuit — is meaningful. It is the product of an actual jury of actual people who sat through a trial, heard testimony, and concluded that Edelman was retaliated against. But it is worth stating clearly what $700,000 represents against the backdrop of a health system that generates billions in annual revenue. It represents a cost that the institution’s legal team will work to reduce at every stage of further proceedings. It does not include punitive damages — those were removed by the district court and the Second Circuit affirmed that removal. It does not include attorney’s fees in any amount stated in the record. It does not compensate Edelman for the years of her career lost, the patients she could not continue treating, or the professional identity that was systematically dismantled by men who were “bothered” that she had the audacity to complain about being called a bitch at work.
What NYU Bought With A Secret File
What Now: Who Is Still At The Table
The Second Circuit has reinstated the jury’s $700,000 verdict against NYU Langone and Joseph Antonik, and has ordered a new trial on the retaliation claims against David Kaplan. That new trial has not yet happened as of the date of this ruling. The following individuals were named as defendants in this case and their institutional roles are documented in the appellate record.
Note: The above roles are as stated in the appellate record. Current employment status of these individuals is not verified in the source document and is not reported here.
Regulatory Watchlist
These are the federal and state bodies with jurisdiction over the conduct documented in this case. They have the power to investigate, fine, and require institutional change:
- EEOC
- DOJ Civil Rights Division
- NLRB
- NY State Division of Human Rights
- NYC Commission on Human Rights
- NYS Dept. of Labor
- CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
- The Joint Commission
What You Can Do
If you work in a hospital or healthcare system and have experienced retaliation for reporting discrimination or misconduct: document everything with dates and exact language. File complaints with both internal HR and external bodies simultaneously. Do not wait on one before pursuing the other. The timeline in this case shows that waiting for HR to respond is not a viable strategy when HR is reporting your complaints to your supervisors.
If you are a patient at an NYU Langone facility: you have the right to request your care team, to change providers, and to file complaints with the New York State Department of Health and The Joint Commission if you have concerns about the quality or continuity of your care.
Support workers organizing in healthcare: the conditions that allowed NYU to build a surveillance file on a doctor for over a year without internal pushback are the same conditions that suppress organizing, retaliate against patient advocates, and punish workers who speak up. Unions and worker centers in healthcare need sustained support. Find your local healthcare worker union or worker center and plug in.
Legal mutual aid: organizations like the National Women’s Law Center, Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, and local legal aid societies provide resources and referrals for workers facing gender discrimination. If you know someone in a similar situation, connect them to these resources before the statute of limitations runs.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
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