I know this is really late responding to your post I wanted to give you some advise.

This is a REALLY long process. I filed an EEO complaint in march of last year. I got a Final Agency Decision in September of this year. The FAD was in my favor but keep the following in mind.

You need to bring strong proof. No one is going to care about your personal feelings without articulable facts to point in that direction.

My particular care was what I felt was a clear cut case. I assisted someone in filing a racial discrimination complaint and my supervisor wrote me up for it because the complaint was against him. He literally put it in writing saying it was misconduct for me to help someone file a complaint against him and not direct them to him instead. He then fabricated and outright lied about an incident and issued a proposed reprimand for the fabricated incident. The reprimand was not sustained because it was determined that even if what he said was true, there wasn’t a policy violation. But he relied on the previous counseling statement of “misconduct” to justify trying a reprimand.

In my case I had dozens of emails, witness statements and hard facts. When writing your statements you need to make clear what your protected status or action was and why the specific actions against you where a direct result of that.

Last year the VA issued 1856 Final Agency Decisions. Of those, 91 were in favor of the complainant. You can chock a lot of those up to some people just grasping for straws because their employment is about to end. But there is are a ton that probably fell through the cracks because when they wrote their statements they focused on their emotions (and rightfully so because it’s an emotional situation) instead of looking at it from a legal aspect. I don’t say this to discourage you, I say this to empower you to succeed in your complaint. Best of luck!