A former SpaceX employee who suffers from Crohn’s disease claims supervisors monitored his restroom use, timing each toilet break and issuing a formal reprimand if he wasn’t back within 10 minutes.
That’s according to a federal discrimination lawsuit obtained by The Independent, which says Douglas Altshuler’s gastrointestinal condition makes it impossible for him to last more than 35 to 45 minutes without a trip to the lavatory – meaning as many as 14 times over the course of an eight-hour shift.
But not only would the 58-year-old Altshuler be disciplined for taking longer than his bosses deemed necessary, they brazenly “threatened termination if [he] used the bathroom too often,” the lawsuit contends.
People living with Crohn’s “often suffer from debilitating urgency to use a restroom immediately, or risk having an embarrassing accident,” according to the nonprofit Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.
After Altshuler went to management about the issue, complete with a doctor’s note outlining his debilitating ailment, his suit says they dismissed his grievance as “unsubstantiated.” When Altshuler pushed back on the seeming lack of concern for his physical well-being, the suit says he was subsequently let go for “alleged deficient performance.”
Altshuler’s suit also takes aim the Elon Musk owned SpaceX’s business and safety practices, accusing the company of denying him proper meal breaks, shorting his pay, exposing him to toxic chemicals, and, in one instance that he reported to both state and federal authorities, he “witnessed industrial parts being dried in the kitchen oven where employees cook their food.”
Lawyer Clive Pontusson, a former trial attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is representing Altshuler in the case. He said SpaceX has “a legal responsibility” to accommodate workers’ disabilities.
The law says that an employee has a right to ask their employer for a reasonable accommodation for a disability, “without fear that their job will be threatened or taken away,” Pontusson told The Independent.
“The law also says that employees should be able to raise concerns about workplace safety without fear of retaliation,” he said, noting that government regulators “eventually substantiated many of Mr. Altshuler’s concerns about an unsafe work environment at SpaceX.”
A SpaceX spokesperson and the attorney defending the company against Altshuler’s lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.
Altshuler began working at SpaceX, one of the numerous entities headed up by Musk, the erratic billionaire and Donald Trump’s “First Buddy,” on June 2023, where he was assigned to answer customer support calls at its Redmond, Washington, facility, according to his complaint. The Redmond campus includes a factory where components are assembled for Starlink, the SpaceX unit that provides mobile broadband service by way of a network of satellites put into orbit aboard the company’s rockets.
The job seemed fine until early 2024, when Altshuler’s supervisor “began tracking Mr. Altshuler’s bathroom breaks and repeatedly criticized [him] for using the bathroom,” the complaint states.
In response, it says Altshuler provided the supervisor with a letter from his physician requesting a reasonable accommodation due to his Crohn’s, namely, permission to use the bathroom every 35 to 45 minutes. The supervisor acknowledged that Altshuler had a legitimate disability, and assured him that “he would never restrict [his] restroom use,” the complaint continues.
Further, it goes on, a second manager gave Altshuler his word that the company would not “question or track his bathroom usage.”
The SpaceX Human Resources department followed up by asking Altshuler to fill out reasonable accommodation request forms, according to the complaint. However, since Altshuler had been informed by supervision that he would be free to use the toilet as needed, the complaint says he told HR that he did not need to formalize things “because leadership confirmed that his bathroom use would not be restricted.”
Yet, according to Altshuler, the fragile peace didn’t hold for long. His supervisor soon went back to monitoring his bathroom breaks, and, the complaint alleges, would give Altshuler an “occurrence” – that is, an adverse write-up – if he was away from his desk for more than 10 minutes, the complaint states. So Altshuler went to his boss’s bosses to report his ongoing predicament, according to the complaint.
They asked for details, which Altshuler provided in an email, the complaint says. Still, it alleges, higher-ups “responded with confusion.”
When it came time for Altshuler’s next performance review, his “threatening and argumentative” supervisor, apparently upset over Altshuler having escalated the bathroom matter up the chain of command, allegedly retaliated by giving him an unsatisfactory appraisal that included “alleged performance deficiencies which were never brought to [Altshuler’s] attention before,” the complaint states.
In October 2024, Altshuler was reassigned to a new supervisor, according to the complaint. Nevertheless, it says his old supervisor still continued to listen in on Altshuler’s customer calls throughout the day and kept watch over his support tickets. It felt to Altshuler that he was being bullied, so he again notified HR about what was going on, the complaint states.
That November, Altshuler was forced to file a workers’ compensation claim and take three weeks of medical leave due to a debilitating “chemical exposure” on the job, according to the complaint, which says he then notified the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about the incident. Altshuler also told OSHA and the Washington Department of Labor and Industries about the SpaceX employee he claimed to have seen drying industrial components in the breakroom oven, the complaint states.
When Altshuler returned to work, bathroom visits once again became a point of contention, his complaint alleges. This time, it says, Altshuler’s new supervisor threatened to fire him if he used the toilet “too often.”
In mid-December, Altshuler went to the head of HR with his grievances, according to the complaint. He had now been working at SpaceX for some 18 months, and his managers were still making his life miserable on a constant basis, the complaint states.
It says Altshuler additionally revealed to HR that he, in fact, was the one who had informed government regulators about the alleged safety problems.
On January 6, 2025, HR emailed Altshuler with their findings, telling him that “his concerns… were unsubstantiated,” according to the complaint. The same day, he contacted SpaceX’s HR chief, upset that the company had “dismissed his claims as being without merit despite the evidence he presented,” the complaint says.
Three days later, SpaceX fired Altshuler for “deficient performance,” according to the complaint.
The multiple grievances Altshuler reported to SpaceX “regarding discrimination, retaliation and safety issues, [his] request for reasonable accommodation, and [his] workers’ compensation claim were motivating factors in the decision to terminate [his] employment,” the complaint states.
It says the ordeal caused Altshuler mental anguish, humiliation, pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life.
Broadly speaking, Pontusson, Altshuler’s attorney, told The Independent, “The company’s actions are egregious and in clear violation of the law. Mr. Altshuler intends to seek all legal remedies that are available to him.”
Altshuler is now seeking economic damages for back pay, front pay, lost benefits, and medical expenses in an amount to be determined by a jury, along with actual, compensatory, consequential, incidental and exemplary damages for disability discrimination, retaliation, failure to accommodate, wrongful termination and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
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