A federal appeals court has reinstated retaliation charges filed against an employer by a manager who was fired six weeks after she reported a subordinate had been sexually harassed.

Kelley Donley, who was a clinical manager for Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Stryker Sales Corp., a medical technology firm, learned from co-workers in June 2014 that one of the company’s sales managers had sexually harassed a subordinate, according to Monday’s ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in Kelley Donley v. Stryker Sales Corp..

Ms. Donley filed a formal harassment complaint with Stryker’s human resources director, and the company investigated the complaint, which resulted in the manager’s firing, although he also received a substantial severance package, according to the ruling.

In August 2014, just after the manager was fired, Stryker began investigating Ms. Donley herself, said the ruling. The focus was an incident six weeks earlier at a team meeting in Vail, Colorado, in which Ms. Donley had taken a photograph of an intoxicated female CEO of one of Stryker’s vendors.

The parties dispute precisely when Ms. Donley’s photographs first came to the attention of the human resources director and Ms. Donley’s supervisor. However, according to the company, the two officials decided Ms. Donley should be fired because “taking photographs of a valued partner while intoxicated was unacceptable,” said the ruling.

Ms. Donley then filed suit against Stryker in U.S. District Court in Chicago charging retaliation against her based on the internal complaint she had filed in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The District Court granted Stryker summary judgment dismissing the case, which was unanimously overturned by a three-judge appeals court panel.

“Viewing the facts at summary judgment in the light most favorable to Donley … the evidence could convince a reasonable jury that her firing was retaliatory,” said the panel.

“Donley’s timeline, which is supported by evidence in the record, exposes inconsistencies and contradictions” between the human resource director’s and the supervisor’s accounts “of why Stryker began the investigation that ended with Donley’s discharge,” said the ruling.

“There is evidence that (the human resources director) launched the investigation of Donley and the Vail incident about a day after resolving that internal complaint, and that she drafted Donley’s termination letter after consulting with (the supervisor) about the investigation into the Vail incident.

“If a person with retaliatory animus ‘provided factual information or input that may have affected the adverse employment action,’ then the employer can still be held liable for a retaliatory firing,” said the ruling, in quoting an earlier case and remanding the case for further proceedings.