Quoting former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. on the discriminatory bind an employer puts a woman in by labeling her as too "aggressive," a former executive director of a Wall Street investment firm on Tuesday sued the company for gender discrimination, claiming it had labeled her as just that before pushing her out.

Ashley Pullen, a former executive director at Bramshill Investments, an alternative asset manager with about $2.5 billion under management, also lays out a detailed retaliation claim against Bramshill in her 32-page complaint launched in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

She claims she was fired for wholly pretextual, retaliatory reasons, just one week after she told Bramshill CEO Stephen Selver, who'd allegedly accused her of being a source of "tension," that "the only reason this tension exists is because you are running the marketing team [at Bramshill, of which she was a part] like a boys' club."