[PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit

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No. 22-11462 ____________________

PAUL OSSMANN, Plaintiff-Appellant, versus MEREDITH CORPORATION,

Defendant-Appellee.

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cv-03200-SDG ____________________ USCA11 Case: 22-11462 Document: 50-1 Date Filed: 09/08/2023 Page: 2 of 49

2 Opinion of the Court 22-11462

Before JILL PRYOR and GRANT, Circuit Judges, and MAZE, ∗ District Judge. GRANT, Circuit Judge: Paul Ossmann was the Chief Meteorologist at CBS46, an Atlanta news station. But during his tenure, female colleagues raised repeated complaints that he engaged in inappropriate conduct and sexual harassment—including “compliments” about appearance, sexually charged language, requests for nude photos, and more. After several meetings with Ossmann did not stop the behavior, it became clear to local managers that he could no longer work at CBS46. The managers needed authorization from the station’s parent company to terminate his employment, so the local Human Resources Director moved the Ossmann file up the chain. She sent a termination request form to the corporate office explaining that Ossmann had violated the company’s sexual harassment policies; the form also included Ossmann’s race, the demographics of his colleagues, and identification of potential comparator employees who had engaged in similar conduct. Ossmann, who is white, alleges that he was terminated because of his race in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981. The sexual harassment justification, he says, was just a pretext. To survive

∗ The Honorable Corey L. Maze, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama, sitting by designation. USCA11 Case: 22-11462 Document: 50-1 Date Filed: 09/08/2023 Page: 3 of 49

22-11462 Opinion of the Court 3

summary judgment, Ossmann needed to show that a reasonable jury could conclude that if he were not white, the station would not have terminated him. The district court found that he did not make that showing, and Ossmann asks us to overturn that conclusion. He notes that the station’s new meteorologist is a Hispanic woman, but mostly argues that the existence of race data on the corporate form means that he was fired because he was white. We cannot agree. The presence of race data in the local station manager’s termination request is not enough for any jury to reasonably conclude that Ossmann’s sexual harassment conduct, much of which he admitted, was pretext for the true reason for Ossmann’s firing—his race. We affirm the grant of summary judgment. I. Meredith Corporation hired Paul Ossmann in 2012 as a temporary weekend meteorologist for CBS46. Ossmann became the station’s Chief Meteorologist in mid-2017 and remained in that position until he was terminated less than two years later, in April 2019. During that time, Ossmann’s female co-workers