Who Said She Said
You never know who is telling the truth in these things.
Whitney Wolfe, a former executive and co-founder of dating app Tinder, has sued the company and majority stakeholder IAC Inc for “atrocious sexual harassment and sex discrimination”, which allegedly included being called a “whore” at a company event. Tinder screenshots In a filing at the Superior Court in Los Angeles, Wolfe …
Presumably the server logs of the emails and texts would give us a good idea of who said what. The statement from the management saying "Through that process, it has become clear that Mr. Mateen sent private messages to Ms. Wolfe containing inappropriate content." seems pretty clear though.
Problem is that they where in a relationship that went south at some point.
Whats the betting that the relationship ended and all was fine until one party started dating someone else?
The moral of the story is dont use your work email to tell your significant other that you want to butter her muffin!
Because of course a woman scorned never has an axe to grind!
Your assumption that whatever is filed in the suit is true is the same mistake people made over the president of the Oxford union when he was accused of rape.
Will be interesting to see both sides of the story.
I agree, you can never tell with these things. There is a reason why many C-level executives today have offices with glass walls, their own private bathrooms, and cameras with voice recorders in their offices and that is to protect against phony sexual harassment cases.
The sad, unfortunate truth is that sometimes it doesn't matter if there is absolutely no evidence that the harassment happened, the accusation itself is enough to destroy the careers of good people. All the accuser needs is a lawyer with the morals of a tapeworm and a grand enough story that it gets picked up and repeated.
And sometimes it isn't really harassment - I suspect many of you would be shocked at how a pretty girl can stalk upper management with a consensual relationship then turn around and claim harassment. Even if it is consensual, she has a case and she will get paid. In 2003 I saw a girl with an agenda go through the CEO, the VP of Sales, and VP of Marketing. This girl never should have been hired - she had a PlayboyTM centerfold body that would make a bishop kick out a stained glass window. Yes, she threatened a lawsuit and got a nice, fat out of court settlement. There is a name for women like that...
Never dip your pen in the company inkwell.
Or for the terminally ignorant, do not ever date or hookup with anyone you work with. It WILL go wrong eventually.
All that said and done, I agree with BillG's comment above as until we have a copy of the emails to read, this IS a case of "He Said, She Said" and it came from people who wrote an app that "hooks up" people who only want casual sex. Consider the source, people. Consider the SOURCE.
No, the word is truly "only".... If you wanted to date you'd use a real dating service, for details look here : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/unwritten-rules-tinder_n_3689441.html
Or just google "tinder". You'll get the idea, kinda like fuckbook but a nicer name.
Young people statistically don't "date" these days, they "hookup".
Yeah, the "brogrammer" meme is a little silly. But it is appropriate in this case. Especially during this current bubble, these web startups and other tech companies seem to attract this weird hybrid techie-fratboy-salesman type. Maybe it's because that's where all the money is, and you don't have to be a complete nerd to throw together an iPhone app connected to a Ruby backend.
It'll be interesting if the VCs just sweep this under the rug and give this woman a huge payout. Otherwise, we'll probably see some very entertaining emails come to light, and then we can judge who gets most of the blame. The fact remains that tech, especially startups, are overwhelmingly male environments. And there's lots of opportunities for misogynistic behavior...undersocialized nerds on one end, whose only contact with females is in an adult entertainment context, coupled with hypersocialized ex-fratboy "executives." Look at all the allegations with Mark Hurd and various other Oracle slimeballs -- that's probably amateur hour compared to this.[1]
We'll see what happens...should be interesting.
[1] Read the account published in the Mark Hurd case. Granted, it's the victim's side of it, but that guy overloads the creep-o-meter...
....to remember before chewing the company candy.
1) Everybody knows. You may think you're being discreet. You may think you're doing a great job of seperating work and personal time / issues. You're not. Everybody knows.
2) For all those that genuinely believe they've beaten rule #1; Everybody STILL knows!
I know I am being finicky here and splitting hairs to some extent but I find it both intersting and confusing to note that both El Reg and the BBC both reported this story in the same way - namely that someone was suing an app. In fact the Beeb's headline was open to further interpretation as one might have assumed that the plaintiff had actually been harassed BY the app. That made my brain flip when I also read that she was an ex-employee of the firm, and had had some kind of relationship with one of the founders.
Why on earth would you refer to the COMPANY or ONE OF THE INDIVUALS IN THE COMPANY as an 'app'? That's terribly inaccurate and, at best, a very confusing thing to do.
Phew. I feel better now - I'm just off to sue Sim City - not the publishers, but the ACTUAL FRIGGIN GAME ITSELF. Yep. After that it's Angry Birds.