Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Abdul El-Sayed (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images) Left-wing Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told an older female colleague that he didn’t want to work with “anyone over 40” as he prepared to assume a prestigious role at New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine, according to a 2019 age and gender discrimination lawsuit brought by former employees against the institution. Though the suit does not name El-Sayed as a defendant, he is a central villain in the complaint, the Free Beacon‘s Alana Goodman reports. “Eight former female employees at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai allege that, when their department, Mount Sinai Global Health, was reorganized into the Arnhold Institute for Global Health (AIGH) in 2015, new boss Prabhjot Singh demoted them and pushed them out of their roles,” Goodman writes. “They claim Singh sought to fill leadership positions with ‘overwhelmingly young men’ in his social circle—including his first hire, El-Sayed, who worked with Singh at Columbia University.” “The complaint alleges that El-Sayed, who was 30 at the time, told one female AIGH employee ‘that he was excited to not be working with “anyone over 40.”’ That woman was 41 at the time of that conversation. El-Sayed and Singh ‘made numerous statements about how they only wanted to work with young people,’ said the plaintiffs. ‘They wanted to run AIGH like a Silicon Valley start-up and believed, as is common in that world, that effective enterprises should be run by young men.’” El-Sayed, who was a year out of medical school at Columbia at the time (he did not complete a residency), declared at a “Women for Abdul” campaign initiative in mid-March that “incredible women raised me” and “incredible women guide me today.” He didn’t say whether those women were over the age of 40. The lawsuit will move forward as El-Sayed reaches the crucial stages of the primary, which takes place August 4. Two versions of the complaint—one state and one federal—are active and in the discovery stages. A group of plaintiffs were dropped from the federal case due to the statute of limitations and took their allegations to the state level as a result. READ MORE: Michigan’s El-Sayed Told Women He Didn’t Want To Work With ‘Anyone Over 40,’ According to Embarrassing Discrimination Lawsuit