Yes, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville (2009) that Title VII’s protection against retaliation extends to a worker who speaks out against discrimination when questioned during an employer’s internal investigation. Some lower courts had ruled that the anti-retaliation clause of Title VII did not extend to cover employees during internal investigations.

The Court explained that there is “reason to doubt that a person can ‘oppose’ by responding to someone else’s question just as surely as by provoking the discussion, and nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question.”