Many termination cases involve the following scenario of competing arguments. You claim that you were fired in retaliation for making some kind of protected complaint or disclosure. The employer claims that you were fired because of the complaint/s made about you by your co-workers or the employer’s customers. Determining whether those complaints were actually made can be of great importance in evaluating your case.
If those complaints were in fact made, however unfair they might be, and the employer claims that they relied on those complaints when making their decision to terminate you, then proving that unlawful retaliation was the real reason for firing you is generally going to be much more challenging. You will have to have some specific evidence suggesting that the employer didn’t really care so much about those complaints and that the real reason for termination was in fact retaliation. It would be important to review the timing of certain key documents, emails, and text messages regarding the termination decision to determine whether the decision was already made before the complaints in question, or whether the termination was in fact triggered by those complaints. It would be also useful to see how the employer has been handling similar complaints against other employees.
On the other hand, if the employer made up the whole story about the complaints against you and they are totally fabricated, or if the employer asked certain employees to accuse you of certain misconduct or criticize you after the fact, this can be used as additional evidence of retaliatory motive against you, along with other facts, making the employer look particularly evil, thereby enhancing the case, if it’s otherwise valid.
In these types of cases, it is really worth contacting the alleged complainants to see if they actually complained, if you are not sure. They may or may not want to speak, but it can’t hurt to try to talk to them and it doesn’t cost anything to do so.