When Rehab Mohamed started as an instructional designer at SHRM in 2016, she believed the Society for Human Resource Management — the nation's leading HR professional organization — would be a place where her concerns would be taken seriously. Instead, she says she faced a supervisor who micromanaged her in ways she never witnessed with white colleagues, excluded her from meetings, and subjected her to increasingly strict scrutiny. After she complained internally, the retaliation escalated. A federal court in Colorado had other ideas about how this story would end. In December 2024, a jury awarded Mohamed $11.5 million — and this month, the court rejected SHRM's attempt to overturn that verdict.
The case offers a striking example of what accountability can look like when an organization fails to live up to its own standards. SHRM, which sets industry benchmarks for human resources practices, argued before trial that its status as an HR authority should prevent the court from holding it to a higher standard than other employers. The judge disagreed, noting that SHRM's expertise in discrimination law was directly relevant — and that some of SHRM's legal maneuvers could themselves be viewed as an attempt to use that knowledge to construct a pretext. "A reasonable jury could infer that management knew that they were going to be in a pickle because Mohamed had seen through their termination scheme and sought to concoct some evidence for SHRM's benefit in a ham-fisted manner," the court wrote.
The evidence at trial was damning. A white colleague who held the same position and reported to the same supervisor testified that she witnessed the same discriminatory treatment firsthand. She described the supervisor entering her office in a panic and retroactively imposing the same deadlines on her that had been applied to Mohamed — deadlines the colleague had never seen before. The colleague said the supervisor warned her she would face "career repercussions at SHRM" if she missed them, yet she also kept her job. Mohamed, who had filed the initial complaint, was fired in 2020. The jury awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages.
For Mohamed, the five-day trial was the culmination of years of advocacy within an organization she once trusted. She had escalated her concerns through multiple HR representatives and the Vice President of Education, and when those five meetings produced no resolution, she reached out directly to CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. before her termination. Now, two years after filing her lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Section 1981, she has a verdict that validates her experience.
The court offered three lessons for HR professionals: manager training must extend beyond preventing discrimination to include guidance on responding to complaints without retaliation; organizations with HR expertise may face heightened scrutiny precisely because they should know better; and systemic patterns — like treating employees differently based on race — rarely stay hidden once witnesses speak up. In upholding the verdict, the court ensured that the lessons will reach far beyond one courtroom.