Startup CEO Says VC Firm Punished Her for Reporting Sex Assault
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It can also potentially mean the employer is liable as well for not protecting the victim - such as the case being litigated in the article, where Blumberg Capital is alleged to have tried to hush up sexual harassment allegations.
Furthermore, in relationship heavy fields like Entrepreneurship, power politics can and do happen - look at what David Sacks did to Parker Conrad.
Sacks only stopped because PG and sama both threatened to blackball A16Z. Now imagine if you are a less connected founder like Parker Conrad - you don't have many options and if you go public, you might be blackballed despite being the victim.
Doesn't meet any definition of "protective". I don't know the details here, but if the person did such thing claimed and deserves punishment, it's for society via the criminal justice system to decide and hand out.
I read the article and I'm not seeing that at all.
Since it's impossible to know definitively that every hire you make is a good human, it's inevitable that someone will come along who can really do damage.
That said, culpability at the org level is mostly optics, unless it's a systemic problem. Which this could be.
TLDR if you have a legal team, they'll demand you say nothing and not admit any wrongdoing.
You can end up with mountains of liability while doing nothing wrong. And doing plenty of things wrong while having no practical liability (due to leverage).
Frankly, it’s so common that lawyers often don’t even care about what actually happened, rather what can be spun/alluded to/proven.
Therefore it is not _the action_ of having a child that exposes the man to legal liability, it is verbally accepting and or acting as if the child is his (cases and situations vary greatly).
This is part of why saying "Sorry" is so heavily avoided in certain subcultures, because it accepts culpability.
This shows up everywhere. It's why whistleblower protection laws exist. It's why it's reportedly hazardous for the cops to interrupt domestic disputes. It's why various organizations keep getting caught covering up bad behavior by their members.
It's also worth considering why this happens, instead of just regarding it as something people do because they're inherently malevolent.
Suppose you suspect your organization of violating some law. You think they're supposed to be using some safety feature on their equipment and they're not, or what have you. In a normal organization, you report this to the leadership and if it's a real problem they fix it, because they know what happens if you report it to law enforcement or it causes someone to get hurt and they don't want that.
Now suppose one of your members reports it to law enforcement instead of the organization's leadership. Government inspectors show up and you have to pay lawyers to deal with them, and lawyers are expensive. Reporters write negative stories about you. These things happen even if the person reporting it was wrong and there was never a real problem. Worse, these outsiders are not always that diligent and you could be prosecuted or dragged through the mud despite the person reporting it being the one who made an error. And if they didn't make an error -- if the problem was real -- that's even worse, because now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem. Many laws are even implicitly written under the expectation that honest mistakes are handled internally and only intransigent bastards get reported to the government, so anyone who goes there first is going to be a pariah.
This is legitimately hard to fix because there is a trade off between cost and accuracy. If investigators are more diligent, so they get the result right more often, they have to spend more time finding out what's really going on in an organization they don't come into it with any internal understanding of. Which imposes costs on both the government and the possibly-innocent subject of the investigation. But if they're less diligent then they'll be imposing penalties on innocent people more often. In both cases, any group is not going to want there to be an investigation and is going to be resentful of anyone who causes there to be one.
Governments often make this worse by trying to make it better and imposing penalties on people who fail to report. Because that requirement doesn't eliminate the structural incentive -- if nobody reports then nobody gets punished for not reporting -- but now the group is going to respond with more severe retaliation for reporting because you've just given everyone who didn't report it the incentive to protect the perpetrators to protect themselves and to retaliate against anybody who does.
What you really want here is to do the opposite. Limit the costs and consequences to the unrepentant actual perpetrators, and make sure they're actually guilty, so you don't give the general group the impression that they're all in the same boat and should be collectively fighting against their enemies in the other tribe.
If you make something more expensive, people do it less. If you make engaging with the government more expensive, it's not different. Imposing costs on group members who are not themselves the perpetrators will do that. Creating a system that can ruin the accused even if they're innocent motivates people to circle the wagons.
This isn't an argument that the way people respond is normatively good. But the way people respond is what actually happens, so if that's not what you wanted, you need a different system that doesn't cause people to resist its mechanism because the system itself indiscriminately damages friendlies.
You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case, and is provably almost the norm in countless other cases like this. There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
Even assuming that these were honest mistakes (I don't believe so), the actions taken by leadership in most of these situations tend to wring the complainant out of the system. If there's a "free market" way to resolve these problems, this certainly ain't it, which calls for regulations. If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters. Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Failure to report isn't the problem here. It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
What happens in a particular case is not what motivates behavior in the aggregate. People have incomplete information and use heuristics. If you set up a system that causes people to loath interacting with the government, the prevailing heuristics come to be about what you would expect.
> There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
And that's what the system we have encourages. The prevailing rules and political climate empirically lead to this result.
> If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters.
Consider the alternatives you've laid out here.
Their first option is to go to law enforcement right away, but that immediately leads to a scandal, bad PR, legal expenses, etc. Unless you can significantly mitigate these deterrents, people will inherently have a disinclination to do this, whether it's "required" or not.
Their second option is to try to arbitrate the situation internally. This has an intrinsic advantage because you get an attempt to handle things by people who know the parties and their circumstances, and if it turns out to be a false accusation or some other shenanigans you don't get a public scandal. And if that doesn't work the first option is still available afterwards. So people are going to want to start here.
Now suppose you say that they're not allowed to start there. People are still going to want to and a lot of times they're still going to do it anyway. But once they have, they're now under much more pressure to make sure it goes away even if it turns out not to be a false accusation, because the initially-innocent people who were just trying to avoid a scandal are now regarded as co-conspirators who could be charged if they don't engage in an effective coverup. That is a helluva perverse incentive to create.
> Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Which is a trade off but not always the worst one.
> It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
"People with power will use their power to their own advantage" is nearly a tautology. The question is, how do you create a system that produces reasonable outcomes in that context?
A system that causes intuitive human responses to put people into a situation that exercise of power is necessary to extricate them from it is going to both encourage that result and disadvantage people without influence, which is bad. Ideally you want a system that doesn't harm any innocent people because it's efficient and reasonable, so people don't expect to be unjustly damaged by interacting with it.
Someone from outside the community is an alien and would convict differently than someone who is more integrated with the scenario. Not only is the understanding of the situation different, but the incentives are different.
The scale of society has changed, but imagine what this was like when communities were smaller.
In addition, often times the other executives also behave in the same way as the accused exec and want to protect themselves.
One thing big orgs do a LOT LOT LOT of is cover-ups. I would imagine (gut estimate) 1% or less of such saucy dramatic events ever float out into the public due to limited media coverage and cover ups. It's not about covering whatever accused who is accused of doing this, no, it's about protecting the fine name and reputation of the firm.
So they aren't saying necessarily "we don't care" in a typical case, more like "we care.. buuuut we care way more about our own org, so we're hushing this all up like it never happened and it will never see the light of day".
This is particularly true of very big or very prestigious orgs, your McKinseys, your Goldman, Your Harvard, your Stanford, your federal government, and so on
[1] including one where it was an open secret but the guy was pretty powerful in his world. He’s in jail for rape now so make of that what you will.
CAILIN HARDELL,Plaintiff and Appellant,v. ADRIAN VANZYL,Defendant and Respondent. [1]
"says the middle-aged VC investor and another CEO backed by his firm got her drunk and sexually assaulted her."
The second guy's name is Waleed Mohsen and the VC is Blumberg.
1: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2024...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/how-we-can-close-the-...
When male VCs engage in behavior like this, it scares future founders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_Software
Edit: And yes, I saw what you did there.
Hardell walked to her hotel room and called a rape hotline. A medical examination revealedthat she had sufferedphysical injuries.
Is the court document from a search, or did the article include it and I just missed it?