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On April 27, 2026, I filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction in Gjovik v. Apple Inc., City of Santa Clara, Jenab et al., Case No. 25-cv-07360-PCP, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The hearing is set for June 4, 2026 at 10:00 AM, before Judge P. Casey Pitts in Courtroom 8 — 4th Floor, 280 South 1st Street, San Jose, CA. The hearing is open to the public.
The motion asks the Court to order all hazardous waste, hazardous materials, and toxic gases removed from Apple's semiconductor fabrication plant at 3250 Scott Boulevard within 30 days, to prohibit resumption of hazardous use during the case, and to prohibit the property owner from re-leasing the site to any operator for hazardous use above CalARP, RMP, or Toxic Gas Ordinance threshold quantities. Apple may continue to occupy the building for office or non-industrial use. The relief targets the chemicals — not the building. The full filings:
Since I served the sixty-day notice in June 2025 and filed my Opposition to the City's motion to dismiss in October 2025, the record has only gotten worse for the Defendants. In October 2025, EPA issued a Consent Agreement and Final Order documenting seven RCRA counts. The underlying April 2024 EPA Inspection Report identified 19 Potential Violations — 14 of which were still outstanding when EPA issued its Notice of Violation. Six BAAQMD air-pollution violations remain Pending as of April 26, 2026 — sixteen months after BAAQMD cited them. Santa Clara County's post-Bhopal Toxic Gas Ordinance permitting regime, which exists specifically to prevent catastrophes at facilities like this one, has zero records for this site. Apple's own sworn 2024 throughput report — signed under penalty of law by Apple's EHS Lead in February 2025 — confirms permit-cap exceedances of arsine at 84% over, phosphine at 61% over, and boron trichloride at 824% over. In September 2025, I offered all three Defendants a comprehensive menu of stipulated interim mitigation — air and sewer monitoring with auto-shutoff alarms, public warning signage, basic operator-identification signage (the building bears no public sign identifying Apple as the operator), completion of unfiled hazardous-substance permits, independent professional-engineer assessments, monthly compliance reporting. None of it required admission of liability. All three Defendants refused every measure and offered no counter-proposal. The engineers said it in writingThe most important document in the motion is Apple's own. In its September 2020 Process Hazard Analysis Revalidation, Apple's retained consultant identified specific failure modes — toxic gas leak, fire, explosion, sabotage, truck fire — and assigned to each consequence column the same phrase: "personnel exposure resulting in injury and/or fatality (site personnel or neighbors)." That phrase appears across at least eleven distinct nodes in the document, covering arsine, phosphine, chlorine, ammonia, diborane, silane, and the pyrophoric organometallics like trimethylaluminum and diethyl zinc — chemicals that ignite violently in air or water. Apple's own RMP*Comp dispersion modeling places its arsine worst-case toxic endpoint at 1.1 miles. Inside that envelope: 5,343 residents (a number that excludes the apartment complex across the lot line, which Apple just left out of the count), 1,787 housing units, an amusement park, a college, places of worship, the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, VTA Light Rail, and Highway 101. The Santa Clara Fire Department — the CalARP Administering Agency that received the modeling — has formally written that Apple's plume models are "not favorable for this area" and on June 17, 2025 withheld approval of an adjacent 166-unit residential project pending environmental review. The Granada Islamic School, with up to 900 pre-K through 8th-grade students, sits inside the arsine plume. In a chemical emergency, the school's Shelter-in-Place plan directs the children to evacuate to Meadow Park — directly across the street from the facility. The evacuation route runs the children toward the source. The failure modes Apple's engineers predicted have already materialized. Between June 2016 and May 2024, there were at least eleven toxic gas incidents at the facility, including:
Five chemical-release events in the past three years alone. Santa Clara has been withholding additional incident records since May 2024. Apple's facility sits directly on top of a pressurized artesian aquifer at about 35 feet below grade. Documented head pressure has been increasing since 1988 — a Honeywell monitoring well next door went from 19 feet depth-to-water in 1988 to zero by 1995, with water rising 100 feet up the well shaft. The 2015 Geotechnical Investigation for the apartment site documented four pressurized springs with measured pressure sufficient to drive the water column 10 to 13 feet above grade if uncapped. Apple stores silane, dichlorosilane, silicon tetrachloride, trimethylaluminum, diethyl zinc, and 49% hydrofluoric acid — chemicals that ignite or react violently with water — directly above this system. The geotechnical engineers' only mitigation recommendation was, essentially, don't dig down into it. Apple has known about the increasing aquifer pressure since 2015 and has done nothing. The City has been here before. The Sixth District Court of Appeal held in LSI Logic Corp. v. City of Santa Clara (1995) that the City of Santa Clara was unlawfully negligent for approving sensitive receptors next to chip fabs, and rejected the City's "shelter-in-place safe room" mitigation as inadequate. Current Mayor Lisa Gillmor was on the City Council at the time. The City was on direct, judicially-noticeable notice — thirty years ago — that doing this in this very City violated the duty owed to the surrounding community. The City did it again here, concealed Apple's CalARP-regulated status from the 2015 EIR, and continues to conceal the danger. Apple is also judicially estopped. In my prior personal-injury case before this same District (3:23-cv-04597), Apple won a statute-of-limitations dismissal on the position that, on notice that Apple was operating a semiconductor manufacturing plant at this address, I and any other victims should have immediately suspected the facility as the cause of severe chemical injuries. Apple cannot now turn around and tell this Court the same facility presents no extraordinary risk to anyone living next door. The fab is either ultrahazardous activity or it isn't. What I'm asking forThe motion asks the Court for what the Defendants would not agree to voluntarily:
What comes nextI'll post updates here as briefing develops. Apple, the City, and the property owner have their oppositions due in the coming weeks; my reply follows. If you want to support the case, you can sign the Change.org petition and share it. The community right next door has been kept in the dark about this for nearly a decade, and the people inside the 1.1-mile arsine plume — the residents, the children at the playground across the street, the 900 schoolkids whose evacuation route goes toward the source, the worshippers at the Family Prayer House nursery, the urgent care patients, the workers who have already been hospitalized — deserve to know. The chemicals at this facility can kill thousands of people in minutes if released. Apple's own engineers admitted that in writing under penalty. It's time for the chemicals to come out. -Ashley
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On April 24, 2026, I filed my Motion for Summary Judgment and Preliminary Injunction in Gjovik v. Apple Inc., Case No. 3:23-cv-04597-EMC, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The hearing is set for June 11, 2026 at 1:30 PM before the Honorable Edward M. Chen in Courtroom 5, 17th Floor of the San Francisco Courthouse. The hearing is open to the public — come watch.
The full filings:
(Quick refresher on what summary judgment is, since I walked through this back in January: the Court can decide substantive issues — or the whole case — before trial when there is no dispute of fact. That's usually because the parties agree on what happened, or because there's direct documentary evidence proving a fact. In retaliation cases, employers usually file these motions because they have most of the evidence and like to wrap things up before the employee can show the jury what really happened. This time, I'm the one filing.) For the first time in this case — almost five years after firing me — Apple has now committed under oath, on a complete record, to a specific set of reasons for terminating my employment. There are three:
Each one is itself conduct that California law expressly protects from retaliation. So the entire motion is one sentence: Apple fired me, told me three reasons, and each of those reasons is conduct that's protected as a matter of law. Reason 3 is brand new — and Apple fought to keep it hidden for nearly five yearsThis is the part of the case I most want readers to understand, because it didn't happen the way I expected and it changes how I had to draft this motion. For nearly five years, Apple referred vaguely to "inconsistencies" or a "misleading impression" Plaintiff had supposedly created during an internal investigation. Apple never said what the inconsistency was, what I had supposedly misrepresented, or how it bore on the termination decision. The September 9, 2021 termination email didn't say. The September 15, 2021 letter from Apple's outside counsel didn't say. Apple's March 2022 sworn DOL/OSHA position statement didn't say. Apple's August 2025 verified interrogatory responses didn't say. And — importantly — Apple's Amended Answer didn't say either. It used the same boilerplate it had used for years. I tried repeatedly to make Apple identify what it was actually claiming. I filed motions to strike Apple's affirmative defenses. The Court ordered Apple to plead concrete factual allegations, observing in May 2025 that the supporting information was "at least in part, within [Apple's] possession, custody, or control." Apple's amended Answer continued to use boilerplate. In July 2025 I served Special Interrogatories asking Apple to identify the complete factual basis of every stated termination reason and every affirmative defense. Apple refused to answer most of them. I filed a motion to compel in March 2026. Apple defended its prior non-responses as adequate. On March 30, 2026, Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore rejected Apple's interrogatory-counting methodology, granted my motion, and ordered Apple to supplement. The same order observed that this case had produced "an unprecedented number of discovery disputes" expending "a considerable amount of the Court's limited judicial resources." That is what it took to get Apple to disclose:
I did not have the certified transcript of Bertolus's testimony until 3:25 PM on April 22, 2026 — less than 24 hours before the motion deadline. I paid $4,036.09 in expedited transcript fees to get it that fast. I worked through the night cutting an initial 50-page draft down to the Court's 25-page limit and filed one day late, on April 24. I filed a Motion for Leave to File Past Deadline on April 25 explaining the cause of the delay; Apple filed a motion to strike. Judge Chen has not yet ruled on either. Once you understand that Reason 3 only crystallized at Bertolus's April 17 deposition, the substance of what Bertolus said becomes the heart of the motion. Bertolus testified that his decision to terminate me was based, in part, on my July-August 2021 complaint of sexual misconduct against my senior director Dan West related to a 2017 dinner. He testified that:
Asked at the deposition whether my senior director's communications with me were appropriate, Bertolus responded: "you seem pretty feminine — I don't even want to even go there and speculate." When questioned about that comment later in the deposition, Bertolus stated he did not remember saying it. Apple's counsel objected to the line of questioning. West himself, at his April 13 deposition, testified that Apple's own ER investigators told him his conduct toward me at the 2017 dinner was "not appropriate." He confirmed under oath that he had told me in text messages that what he had done that night with the sous chef "was one of the worst things [he'd] ever done." The sous chef — whom my senior director arranged a sexual or romantic liaison with at a $200+ dinner West paid for — is now deceased. I did not know any of this when I filed my complaint in this lawsuit in 2023. I did not know any of this when Apple filed its Amended Answer. I did not know any of this when Apple filed its sworn DOL position statement, or when Apple verified its interrogatory responses through August 2025. I learned the substance of Apple's third stated reason for firing me through court-ordered discovery in April 2026. Why "Reason 3" is, on its own, summary-judgment material.... Once you have the disclosure, the legal point is straightforward. Filing a sexual harassment complaint is protected activity under FEHA, Title VII, California Labor Code § 1102.5(b), § 98.6, and supports a Tameny claim for wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. The right to complain does not depend on the merits of the complaint. Wrighten v. Metro. Hosps., Inc., 726 F.2d 1346, 1356 (9th Cir. 1984). Treating a protected complaint as itself misconduct — calling it "misleading" because the complainant didn't object contemporaneously, or didn't text the right things during the underlying conduct — is itself retaliation. Yanowitz v. L'Oreal USA, Inc., 36 Cal.4th 1028, 1043 (2005); Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 68 (1986). When the Vice President of a Fortune 50 company testifies that a stated reason he fired a Senior Engineering Program Manager was, in part, the manager's complaint of sexual misconduct by her supervisor — a complaint that Apple's own ER investigators told the supervisor was warranted — that is direct evidence of retaliation. No burden-shifting analysis is required. Wallace v. County of Stanislaus, 245 Cal.App.4th 109, 123 (2016). The new statute that helpsThere's also a new California statute that didn't exist when this case was filed. In 2023, California passed SB 497, codified at Labor Code § 98.6(b)(1) and effective January 1, 2024. It creates a rebuttable presumption of retaliation whenever an employer takes adverse action within 90 days of protected activity. I cleared every protected activity in this case within 90 days of being fired. Many of them within days: 10 days after the August 30 Twitter post Bertolus identified as the trigger; 6 days after my September 3–7 written-communications requests; 11 days after my OSHA and California Labor Commissioner filings; 14 days after my NLRB filing; 17 days after my August 23 Issue Confirmation went to Apple's Senior Director of Employee Relations and Senior Director of Legal-HR; 21 days after the EPA inspection of my office; 28 days after my EEOC/DFEH charge — which issued its Right to Sue letter the morning of my termination. The presumption attaches. And here's the thing: Apple's only stated reasons are the three identified above, and each one is itself protected activity. Retaliation cannot rebut a presumption of retaliation. Apple has nothing else to point to. A few of the more striking facts the motion lays out:
I want to highlight the second termination reason briefly because, with the harassment-complaint piece now in the record, it lands differently. Apple's "refusal to cooperate" finding rests on the fact that I asked for investigation communications to be in writing. Both Kagramanov and Okpo admitted at deposition that no Apple policy prohibits written-communication investigations or requires oral-only meetings. I had a real reason for the request: I was filing an NLRB affidavit the next day, and I had pending complaints with EEOC, DFEH, OSHA, and the California Labor Commissioner. I wanted a record. And what was the unrecorded oral conversation Apple insisted on? Okpo testified that the basis of his September 3 and September 7 outreach — the outreach Apple built Reason 2 on — was to question me about whether I had texted, during the 2017 dinner, that the sous chef my senior director set me up with was "cute." Reason 2 thus rests on my refusal to submit to unrecorded oral questioning, by a male investigator, about whether I had been interested in engaging in sexual activity with the man my supervisor set me up with — the underlying conduct of my own harassment complaint. I have a right to make a complaint, and I have a right not to be subjected to intrusive questioning about my sexual interests. Apple has refused to comply with the Court's order requiring a Rule 30(b)(6) corporate deposition. On April 22, 2026, Magistrate Judge Westmore characterized Apple's position on the 30(b)(6) deposition as "unreasonable" and stated that Apple "should know better." Apple has continued to refuse to commit to a date. The Court directed me to include a request for a preliminary injunction in this motion. (Order at Dkt. 273.) I'm asking the Court to reinstate me to payroll and to medical, dental, and vision insurance at the level in effect on September 9, 2021, pending final judgment. Loss of employer-provided health coverage threatening access to medical care is irreparable harm under Ninth Circuit law. On the balance of equities, Apple's own witness gave them away: my senior director, Dan West, testified he would provide me an equivalent position if legally ordered to reinstate. Briefing schedule from here:
This case has been pending for nearly three years. Apple has spent that time refusing to produce evidence, shifting its story, and asking the Court for delay after delay. The harassment-complaint-retaliation reason — Reason 3 — Apple kept buried in boilerplate for nearly five years and disclosed only after a court order and a deposition one day after the discovery cutoff. Now its own admissions, finally on the record under oath, are what I'm using to ask the Court to rule in my favor as a matter of law. I'll post updates here as briefing develops. The hearing is public. So is the trial in October. It's happening. — Ashley |
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