A former Wells Fargo senior vice president who spent almost 40 years with the bank has filed a federal lawsuit claiming age discrimination, anti-LGBTQ bias and retaliation forced him into early retirement in August 2023. Robert Propst, a 63-year-old Rowan County resident, alleges his supervisor questioned his age, dismissed his advocacy for Black colleagues, and made a comment about his husband's race before he was pushed out of the $296,000-a-year job he had held for decades.
Propst's suit, filed in federal court, says he consistently earned high performance ratings meeting or exceeding expectations for more than 38 years before receiving his first negative review — an “inconsistently meets expectations” rating — in mid-2023, according to the Charlotte Observer. He alleges Wells Fargo violated his federal civil rights and state law by terminating him because of his age and disability, and that the bank retaliated against him for raising concerns tied to race, sex and sexual orientation. Wells Fargo disputes the allegations and plans to defend itself in court, according to a bank spokesman cited in the report.
Propst's career at the bank traced back to 1985, when he joined First Union — the institution that eventually became Wachovia and then Wells Fargo. He rose to senior vice president and, in 2017, was tapped to lead the newly created Rebuilding Trust Office, the team charged with fixing the fallout from the bank's 2016 sales practices scandal.
A Team Built to Clean Up a National Scandal
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued its order against Wells Fargo for widespread sales misconduct in September 2016, after employees across the bank opened millions of unauthorized customer accounts to meet aggressive sales quotas. The scandal ultimately cost Wells Fargo $3 billion in a 2020 deferred prosecution agreement and civil settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the SEC. As recently as January 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalized $18.5 million in civil penalties against three former Wells Fargo risk and audit executives tied to the same scandal, according to GARP.
Propst's team, which he says was composed mainly of Black employees, handled that remediation work along with other regulatory issues tied to a formal enforcement order. The Federal Reserve had imposed an asset growth cap on Wells Fargo in February 2018, barring it from expanding its balance sheet until it proved it had overhauled risk management and compliance, according to court filings cited by Cohen Milstein. Propst's team helped clear that consent order in 2021, and it was lifted that same year.
Vision Loss, Remote Work, and a New Boss
Propst has lived with an impairment severely limiting his vision since 2016. After returning to work in 2017, Wells Fargo recognized the disability and approved extra-large monitors along with a fully remote-work arrangement, sparing him a 100-mile round-trip commute to his Charlotte office. The bank placed him on medical disability three times over the years, per the lawsuit's account.
The trouble, Propst alleges, began after he and his team were reassigned in fall 2022 to report to a new supervisor based in Chicago. He says he traveled to Chicago at his own expense that October. His new supervisor allegedly pressured him to end his remote-work accommodation and, according to the suit, treated Black team members differently, made sarcastic remarks about her diversity numbers improving after taking over his team, and told Propst that his Black husband's race was not what she expected.
Pride Leadership and a Pointed Question About Age
Propst alleges his supervisor also asked whether he was the oldest member of her leadership team and later suggested it might be time for him to retire. When Propst sought to continue leading Wells Fargo's Pride employee group, the suit says she told him she would not support it because the group needed younger leaders. Propst says he filed complaints with human resources and bank leadership over these incidents, and that Wells Fargo was aware of the manager's behavior through employee complaints but failed to properly supervise or discipline her.
He was pushed out of his job in late August 2023. Wells Fargo did not publicly post his replacement position, instead filling it with a straight white man roughly 20 years younger than Propst, according to the suit. That replacement later left Wells Fargo after being investigated for racially offensive comments, the lawsuit states. Propst says he had planned to keep working until turning 67 in April 2027.
Legal Claims and What Propst Is Seeking
Propst is seeking a jury trial, more than $1.2 million in estimated lost wages, compensation for emotional distress, punitive damages and attorney's fees. Federal workplace laws — including Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act — bar employers from taking adverse action or retaliating against workers over age, disability, sexual orientation, or opposition to discriminatory practices, according to Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight. Propst's attorney did not respond to a request for comment, the Observer reported.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Charlotte Courts
Propst's case is not the only recent Charlotte lawsuit alleging Wells Fargo punished longtime employees over disability accommodations. Hoodline previously reported that a federal judge in April refused to dismiss a suit from Charlotte finance manager Beth Arbuckle, who alleges the bank downgraded her performance rating and cut her pay after she requested a work-from-home accommodation. In July 2024, a federal jury in Charlotte awarded former Wells Fargo Securities managing director Christopher Billesdon $22.1 million after finding the bank violated the ADA by terminating him shortly after he sought a similar accommodation, according to HR Dive.
The bank has also faced scrutiny over its diversity practices more broadly. Wells Fargo agreed in October 2025 to pay $85 million to settle a federal class-action shareholder lawsuit alleging executives misled investors by holding sham job interviews with diverse candidates for positions that were already filled, as reported by Black Enterprise. Separately, Wells Fargo has noted in SEC filings that both the Justice Department and the SEC closed their inquiries into the bank's diversity hiring practices without taking enforcement action.
Wells Fargo remains one of Charlotte's largest employers, with roughly 10,000 local workers as part of a regional financial services workforce topping 40,000 between Wells Fargo and Bank of America, according to Northeastern University. The company's Uptown Charlotte offices have also been a site of recent labor tension; Wells Fargo workers and organizers held rallies there in April pressing for better pay and union representation as complaints moved through National Labor Relations Board channels.
