From Missouri Digital News: https://mdn.org

JEFFERSON CITY - The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the right of former Kansas City Chiefs employee to call 20 other former employees to testify that they also had been fired because of age.

The suit was filed by Steven Cox was fired in 1998 as the football teams maintenance manager.

At the time of his dismissal, Cox was 61 years old.

His attorney sought to call other Chiefs employees who had been fired around the same time as part of a reorganization of the team under the new chief executive officer, Clark Hunt.

Cox's attorney had presented evidence statements made by the new Chiefs' management of plans to bring in a younger staff.

But the circuit court prohibited 20 former terminated Chiefs employees from testifying about their terminations, ages or age-discrimination lawsuits.

The judge said that Cox had not claimed in his suit that there was a pattern of age discrimination nor that there was a hostile work environment.

In a 5-2 decision, the state high court overturned the lower court judges refusal to allow the witnesses to testify.

The court found the circuit court judge's ruling in error.

It cited other cases in which appeals-level courts have upheld the right of what it called "me too" evidence to question other employees about similar job-discrimination actions.

The state Supreme Court found the judge's decision "an abuse of discretion in issuing a blanket rejection of other instances of employees being fired based on their age, even where they were fired by the same supervisor or by one reporting to the same supervisor," wrote Judge Laura Denvir Stith.

The excluded evidence "highly logically relevant because it makes the existence of a fact -- the firing of Mr. Cox due to his age -- much more probable than it would be without the evidence," Stith concluded.

Her decision cited evidence Cox had presented showing that Hunt had said the intention was to move the Chiefs in a "more youthful direction."

The decision also criticized the circuit judge for refusing to allow Cox's lawyers to conduct a deposition of Hunt on his efforts for bringing in younger employees.

The Missouri Supreme Court threw out the ultimate circuit court decision which had rejected Cox's lawsuit -- sending the case back to the circuit court.

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