Most of what Frances characterizes as institutional failure, not telling her and not acting against Riley, is actually consistent with proper HR handling. You don’t tip off the subject of a complaint and you don’t retaliate against the person who filed it.
To begin with, it has not been established that Frances was the subject of the complaint. Two, raising a complaint does not give someone the right to comment on a colleague’s rape or on her mental health. If Riley had concerns about Frances, those concerns were potentially valid only to the extent they related to specific work-related behaviors.
So, for instance, it would be relevant for one employee to write that another employee was producing only 50 widgets an hour instead of 60. Speculating that the employee’s reduced performance was due to age, tendonitis, or sadness that they lost their dog would be unwarranted.[1] None of those things are the co-worker’s business.
Employees are not entitled to write whatever they want about their co-workers and get protected status as “complainants.” Especially when they have asked said co-worker out multiple times and been turned down; that raises the specter of a “complaint” as payback.[2]
Proper HR handling would have been for the first person to see the document to rip it up, tell Riley that his comments related to rape and mental health were wildly inappropriate, and tell him that if he wanted to raise concerns they needed to be strictly related to work-related behaviors.
The unanimous 500+ karma response with little critical engagement on a forum that prides itself on epistemics tells us more about this community’s appetite for moral drama than about the severity of what actually occurred.
This strikes me as an unwarranted demand for rigor. We have to make decisions based on the evidence that is available. This forum does not have power to subpoena documents or depose witnesses. Here, for instance, we do have the following considerations:
Frances’ narrative is quite specific (and acknowledges when she doesn’t have information, such as because CEA has so far refused to turn it over).
There are individuals and an organization who would have an incentive to controvert Frances’ statements if they were misleading—including CEA and its allies.
CEA has had an opportunity to respond, has done so, and hasn’t to my ears controverted the core elements of Frances’ statement. It apparently spent significant amounts of time and its donors money on investigation, so should be in a position to correct material misstatements. It already settled with Frances, so should be in a position to correct most misstatements she might have made without compromising any litigating position.
Frances has engaged with comments and skeptics, while CEA has stated that it is unable to do so.[3]
Frances left a post at CEA—one of the marquee jobs in the EA world—which is consistent with her characterization that something went very, very wrong here. I am not aware of any evidence that she did so for any other reason.
There is no dispute that independent investigations found in Frances’ favor here.
Several of Frances’ former colleagues at CEA have written supportive messages; those individuals are arguably in a better position to discern the truth than we are (and are unlikely to be biased against their current employer).
What additional evidence do you think is required and reasonably attainable here?
I decline to speculate on Riley’s motivation for writing, but I think it’s fair to assert that treating all complaints as privileged from disciplinary action facilitates payback for those who would like to obtain it.
CEA may have valid reasons for not doing so, and so I don’t want to score this too heavily. Yet there is no actual evidence that those reasons exist and are substantial, and I don’t think blind and total deference to an organization’s claim of inability is appropriate. So I am going to adjust slightly in favor of the reliability of Frances’ narrative based on her willingness to engage here.
Two, raising a complaint does not give someone the right to comment on a colleague’s rape or on her mental health. If Riley had concerns about Frances, those concerns were potentially valid only to the extent they related to specific work-related behaviors.
So, for instance, it would be relevant for one employee to write that another employee was producing only 50 widgets an hour instead of 60. Speculating that the employee’s reduced performance was due to age, tendonitis, or sadness that they lost their dog would be unwarranted.[1] None of those things are the co-worker’s business
I want to separate what people have a legally protected right to do and what I feel like they have a commonsense right to do. I have approximately no information other than what’s here about what actually went down between Riley, CEA, and Fran. But there are versions of “speculating about a coworker’s mental health” that I think are commonsense-reasonable, and to which I’m morally sympathetic, even if they might be imprudent and legally forbidden.
For example, I think that noticing that a co-worker is underperforming and speculating that the co-worker might be struggling and need extra support because you heard that their dog died recently and they seemed upset about it, can be the result of normal human sympathy and desire to raise relevant information. For example, it’s the kind of thing that I think a normal and well-intentioned person might raise if they noticed a friend of a friend or a cousin struggling.
I’m not saying that you should treat co-workers exactly the same, and there are no risks to doing so. Obviously there are. And I’m not saying anything about Riley-in-particular’s intentions here. I just think that having this kind of condemnatory attitude towards the entire class of behavior that involves ever raising information about potential causes of another’s struggles in a workplace feels like a really harsh and cold attitude towards workplace relationships, and I don’t like it.
Hi, Frances’ partner here. Just want to clarify/provide context for a few things.
Frances and Riley did not work on the same team and did not share any work projects, and didn’t work directly with each other. The only thing they used to share was a room in Trajan their teams used to both work out of. Soon after Frances learned about the existence of the document, she went to community health with concerns as she found it overwhelming to see him in the room she had to work in, and this resulted in community health separating the rooms the teams were working in (after which CEA asked them not to be involved further).
In the 9 months the document was circulated, no one (HR, exec, managers) reached out to Frances with concerns (behavioural or otherwise). We know multiple people were mentioned in the document. We don’t know (and may never know) if there were HR complaints made by Riley about Frances, but we can say for certain if there were complaints about Frances, no one thought it was necessary to mention to Frances.
In the summary of the document CEA provided, I read Riley describe how she was raped. This was more than what we initially thought, where we thought it was potentially much more tame , and thought he maybe said something like “she is a victim of sexual violence” based on how leadership was discussing the document with us. When I read the summary, I was shocked to see how descriptive it was. The “subsequent mental health crisis” that was discussed took place entirely out of the workplace, and Frances took medical leave. And when it did happen, we contacted multiple members of her team letting them know what happened and that she would be taking time off, and she communicated with her team and managers often about navigating work after the assault. I feel comfortable saying this document was not written due to concern for Frances’ wellbeing, given the document also says “I asked her out two times, but now I’m glad she said no”.
I also don’t know if there is missing context about the investigations so I will note the investigator pointed out that that he could not see a situation where writing this would be appropriate in his report. And this was after the investigator interviewed everyone involved, so all context was provided to the investigator. Unless both investigators are somehow deeply unqualified and lacking common sense, it stands to reason it did not make any sense to include. My interpretation of Zach’s comment and my private communication with him also leads me to believe he agrees, or he would not have asked Riley to leave the organisation. And reiterating Frances’ point earlier, Riley refused to apologize, and if you accidentally go too far when discussing someone, it is quite easy to apologize.
Note: Frances is probably going to take a break from this post but I’m happy to answer questions!
“that CEA leadership knowingly enabled sexual harassment”
For what it’s worth, I personally don’t believe leadership “knowingly” enabled sexual harassment and, importantly, the appeal report comes to that same conclusion. The investigator specifically reported he did not see any evidence that the managers “believed” there was sexual harassment occurring and turned a blind eye. But rather, that they did not identify it and did not take reasonable steps to prevent it, as required in the UK under the Worker Protection Act and their own policies (a point you seem to keep avoiding). I do not mean to lead anyone to a different conclusion, and I’m not currently concerned that I have in my post. I do believe they enabled harassment through negligence and ignorance, which is different.
“Frances’s post drives readers toward several conclusions: that this incident reflects systemic misogyny in EA, that CEA leadership knowingly enabled sexual harassment, that the conduct is comparable to the predatory behavior described in the 2023 Time article, and that leadership changes may be warranted.”
I don’t think you’re representing my post very accurately. Further, I am not the comments nor can I control every conclusion readers come to. I think it would be both reasonable to want a leadership change after reading this and reasonable not to. Everyone has a different perspective on what they’d like to see from CEA and its leadership. I’d like to gently point out that the question here should never be, “is leadership bad and evil?” On a personal level, I basically like leadership. The frame here is: we are discussing a nonprofit funded by philanthropic dollars meant to represent a community that is literally about altruism.
“The organization eventually provided meaningful remediation including an apology Frances herself describes as genuine, payment for her legal representation, no confidentiality clause, and personnel changes.”
Let me be very clear: it took enormous effort on my part to achieve this. It is standard for organisation’s to pay for legal representation when attempting to pursue a settlement. In the UK, I wouldn’t have been able to sign the settlement without representation, so that was a necessary step. It was in the organisation’s best interest to settle, because the alternative is that I bring an employment tribunal claim. I do respect their willingness to forego a confidentiality clause, but again, this may not have been purely selfless. I was unwilling to sign a settlement agreement unless they obliged. You can imagine, it would be worse to have no claim waiver and no confidentiality (i.e. I can bring a claim still) than to have a claim waiver with no confidentiality (i.e. I cannot bring a claim).
“Beyond that, any attempt by CEA to provide exculpatory context would be read as attacking a victim of sexual harassment.”
If I have been at all factually incorrect or misleading, I would strongly encourage CEA to say so. Leadership is very welcome to email me to run statements by me if they are concerned about the reputational risk of correcting me. And then, they can say, “we are issuing x corrections, we have Frances’ full support,” or whatever it may be. Personally, I feel I have been very careful and accurate. I quote the appeal report directly for this very reason.
“Riley acted with predatory intent”
I never discuss Riley’s intent, nor will I. But I will point out, he was unwilling to apologise. I find your framing of “clumsiness” incongruent with this. If the sexual harassment was “clumsy,” he could simply say, “I apologise for the sexual harassment and the impact it had, which was unintentional.” He could do so while still standing by whatever else he deemed necessary in the document. And yet, he declined to do that and continues to refuse (to my best understanding, unless he secretly really wants to apologise but has somehow found himself unable and CEA has somehow failed to inform me of this fact).
On your suggestion to “rip it up”: an employer who destroys a written employee complaint, even one containing inappropriate content, exposes itself to significant liability. You preserve the document, address the problematic content, and separate the legitimate concerns from the inappropriate material. That’s messy and takes time, which is roughly what happened here.
There would be some legal risk for rejecting certain kinds of complaints without any action—such as a legally protected complaint that an employee was being subjected to harassment themselves. But there is no evidence that Riley’s complaint about one or more of his co-workers fell into any legally protected category, and it is difficult for me to envision how it would be.
And even if it were necessary to maintain the original complaint on file, you redact the material that constitutes sexual and disability harassment of another employee before broader circulation. It is not “messy” to figure out what portions relate to a legally protected grounds for complaint somewhere before you expose 11 people (over 20% of the company) to the harassing content.
“Most of what Frances characterizes as institutional failure, not telling her and not acting against Riley, is actually consistent with proper HR handling.” A Worker Protection Act breach is proper HR handling in the UK?
“I think the simpler explanation is that the document didn’t read the way she describes it.” It was determined to be harassment and then sexual harassment by two independent investigators.
“too much personal detail.” this seems generous to the point of being misleading.
“We’re asked to believe that HR, legal, the CEO, the COO, and multiple managers all independently failed a basic moral test.” this is effectively confirmed by the investigation findings, yes.
“Everything we know comes from fragments read aloud from memory by a colleague, relayed months later in a post written as advocacy.” And from the investigation outcomes? Are you imagining a document that is determined to be sexual harassment in an investigation, that is actually very mild and defensible? What do you think sexual harassment is?
“If Riley was complaining about behavioral issues connected to Frances’s trauma.” This is not the case, to my knowledge. If he was doing so, CEA is welcome to inform me. Again, if this was an HR complaint about me, I have not been contacted regarding anything to that effect. There are no “behavioural issues connected to my trauma.”
“She herself acknowledges worsening PTSD and difficulty functioning, then providing that context in a complaint isn’t sexualization” what a disgustingly sexist thing to say. My difficulty functioning was with respect to focusing at work and managing my stress levels, nothing more. Again, the complaint was determined to be sexual harassment. There is no world in which you would ever need to describe someone being raped. Ever.
There is absolutely no necessity for anyone to be “monsters” in order for the picture painted in Frances post to be accurate and her anger justified though.
All your contributions in this thread seem to be marked by the idea that people would have to be unusually bad in some way to fail to deal well with sexual harassment. But I don’t see why we should be particularly confident that the base rate of orgs dealing badly with sexual misconduct, in ways that-*correctly*-look really bad to outsiders when the facts come out is all that low. There have been numerous cases where schools, universities, religious institutions etc. have covered up far worse conduct than Riley’s: i.e. sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church as one example among many. Now, of course, we typically don’t hear about the cases where sexual harassment or abuse was promptly identified and the perpetrator fired/imprisoned, unless the perpetrator was independently famous. And there are a lot of people and institutions in the world, so maybe those cases are way more common. But I don’t see any particular reason to be confident of that.
But also, people are generally very good at avoiding believing things that are extremely inconvenient for them, without really noticing they are doing it, and without conscious malice. Most of us are much better at doing this in my view than we think we are. When HR originally received Riley’s doc, they had a choice between 1) trying to start sexual harassment proceedings against him, and 2) overlooking the fact that what he had written about Frances was wholly inappropriate, and possibly malicious, and concentrating on his own complaints. Doing 2) was no doubt made easier by the fact that the doc was apparently not “about” Frances specifically. Now, if they took choice 1), that was a lot of hassle and unpleasantness for them:
A) Potentially having to directly punish Riley. People don’t generally like significantly deliberately harming people they know, and have no personal beef with, and will avoid it if they can. This is maybe especially true of the kind of friendly people personish person who wants to work in HR, although that is only a guess on my part.
B) Having to deal with Riley potentially portraying any investigation of him as retaliatory for his complaints. Even a completely baseless accusation of that is likely to be a huge stress for the people on the receiving end of it. This is likely to have been particularly unpleasant with the kind of person who writes a massive doc giving his detailed personal opinions on multiple colleagues, including for at least one person their mental health, sexual victimization and his own romantic feelings for them, because anyone who does something that inappropriate and obsessive can’t be trust to act normally during a complaints process. This is true even if Riley is in fact a vulnerable, naive person with no malicious intentions, let alone if he is actually vengeful.
C) Having to either upset Frances by informing her about the doc, and having an excruciatingly awkward conversation with her about it, or alternatively NOT inform her even while disciplining Riley, and admit to themselves that they are concealing from Frances that one of her colleagues has sexually harassed her.
On the other hand, if they take choice 2) and just fail to recognize how inappropriate the stuff Riley said about Frances was, then they can realistically hope that Frances never finds out, and they don’t have to upset Riley or Frances, or having any awkward conversations about rape and sexualization of rape victims with anyone or face the consequences of being accused or retaliating against a complainant. They could just hope that Frances never found out about the doc, something that may well have happened if Riley himself had not shown it beyond HR. (Unless the person who informed Frances was themselves in HR anyway). Then they could avoid any stress or hurt feelings. Once the CEO and the COO found out, they also had the same incentives to get this wrong, but with the additional incentive that they could decide to defer to HR’s judgments, since they are the orgs experts on well, HR issues.
I say all this not to excuse anyone at CEA. If this is the psychological dynamics of what happened-which I obviously don’t know-that’s not all that exculpatory. Not dealing with sexual harassment properly because you want to avoid awkwardness/fuss/punishment and you’re in HR or management, is like not running into a burning building as a firefighter because you don’t want to get burnt: it’s your job to get past this stuff! But claims that Frances’ account requires an implausible level of malice or incompetence on the part of multiple people seem wrong to me..
On the legal findings: I’m not an expert in UK employment law [. . . .]
Under section 26 of the Equality Act 2010, harassment occurs when “the conduct has the purpose or effect of—(i) violating B’s dignity, or (ii) creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for B.” In considering whether the conduct has such an effect, “each of the following must be taken into account—(a) the perception of B; (b) the other circumstances of the case; (c) whether it is reasonable for the conduct to have that effect.”
See also section 1.28 of this guidance. So there is an objective element to the test, and relevant circumstances must be considered. So I think it is fair to infer that the external reviewer concluded that it was reasonable for Frances to conclude that the conduct violated her dignity or created an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. I also think it is fair to infer that the external reviewer concluded that the other circumstances of the case were not inconsistent with a finding of harassment. That would be easy; there is no legitimate reason for a co-worker to be circulating a memo about another co-worker’s rape or mental health.
Your post implies that CEA leadership is cowardly, indifferent, and complicit. But an organization that waived confidentiality, paid for your lawyer, never attempted to silence you, and whose CEO gave you what you yourself describe as a genuine apology is not staffed by monsters.
I submit that there is a sliding scale of moral credit for acceptance of responsibility based on timeliness (also true in the UK criminal justice system). These actions came awfully late for me to give too much credit here, especially to the extent that they came after Frances expressed that she would be going public. They could be construed as damage control—the reputational risk of litigation in which documents would come out and those involved would have to testify under oath would dwarf the risk of an EA Forum post. Even without a confidentiality agreement, a settlement is much quieter than the alternative.
“You say the behavioral complaints weren’t connected to your trauma” No, I’m saying there were no behavioural issues ever discussed with me. Thus, there were no substantiated behavioural issues. I don’t know what the document says, exactly.
“You yourself acknowledge worsening PTSD symptoms and difficulty functioning at work during this period.” If you read the post, you’ll see that my PTSD symptoms worsened as a result of the document being written and circulated, and CEA’s lack of response (i.e. after the document was already written).
“but it may be considerably more technical than the way it’s being invoked in this thread.” This seems to imply there is a difference between “technical” sexual harassment and some other definition of sexual harassment, in your mind, that is more egregious. In such a case, what would change your mind here? You would have to read the document and description of my rape yourself?
“But an organization that waived confidentiality, paid for your lawyer, never attempted to silence you, and whose CEO gave you what you yourself describe as a genuine apology is not staffed by monsters.” Certainly. I say the same thing in my post. I never imply anyone at CEA is a monster, nor do I hold that belief. Not at all. Though, I do stand by my section on cowardice. I can understand us having different opinions on that front.
The CEO confirms Riley was raising behavioral complaints about you.
Where in Zach’s comment did he confirm this? He said: ”In the fall of 2024, Riley went to HR with the document Frances references to share complaints about a colleague’s behavior. Those concerns were the focus of Riley’s writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didn’t share) it.” This doesn’t confirm that the complaints were about Frances?
then the inclusion is at least explicable as context
Can you clarify exactly what you’re claiming is explicable to be included as context? Zach’s comment said, “Sharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleague’s sexual assault”. Frances said, “But further, it was more than that. He didn’t neutrally “disclose” it in a single, non-specific sentence. He wrote a description of me being raped. He describes it. He muses and speculates about my subsequent mental health crisis.”
Your post implies that CEA leadership is cowardly, indifferent, and complicit. But an organization that waived confidentiality, paid for your lawyer, never attempted to silence you, and whose CEO gave you what you yourself describe as a genuine apology is not staffed by monsters. They got things wrong. That is meaningfully different from the picture this post paints, and I think the people involved deserve to have that said.
Cowardice was largely a description of other people deferring to leadership, but minor quibble aside, these two claims are not mutually exclusive! The folks involved can be reasonably and fairly perceived to be cowardly, indifferent, and complicit to harms, while also getting things wrong, and also not staffed by ‘monsters’.
We’re asked to believe that HR, legal, the CEO, the COO, and multiple managers all independently failed a basic moral test. More likely, in full context, it read like a messy workplace complaint with too much personal detail.
And we haven’t seen it. Everything we know comes from fragments read aloud from memory by a colleague, relayed months later in a post written as advocacy. We don’t have the information this thread thinks it has.
I would be much more sympathetic to this if it wasn’t for the case that two independent investigations subsequently flagged this as harassment/sexual harassment, including CEA’s own legal team, and the apparently massive shift in behaviour after Frances opted for public accountability.
If Riley was complaining about behavioral issues connected to Frances’s trauma, and she herself acknowledges worsening PTSD and difficulty functioning, then providing that context in a complaint isn’t sexualization. It’s explanation. Clumsy, probably too detailed, but meaningfully different from the post’s framing.
It’s entirely reasonable for someone to submit an HR complaint, and it’s entirely reasonable for you guess that Riley was well intentioned and clumsy rather than malevolent. But it’s not clear to me what your interpretation of the post’s framing is. From my perspective, Frances hasn’t made any claims about Riley’s intent, but just the impact that the circulation of this document.
Nine months went by and I heard absolutely nothing. No safeguarding steps were taken. The document remained in circulation.
For a while, I tried to block the harassment out entirely. I was completely overwhelmed and simply did not have the capacity to process it. I was already managing a PTSD diagnosis as a result of the rape and an ongoing criminal investigation with the UK police. I no longer trusted CEA’s HR. Not to mention, I didn’t have access to the document myself.
As the months went on, I became increasingly anxious and embarrassed around leadership and those who had read the document. Increasingly dissociated. I began having nightmares about new documents being circulated. My therapist noted my PTSD symptoms were continuing to worsen. When I ran into Riley at the office, I would often freeze. I started eating lunch in my team’s room to avoid the cafeteria, or skipping lunch altogether.
To be clear, I don’t think that the focus on Riley’s intention meaningfully changes the mistakes at CEA here! I’d type more on this, but here’s a good passage on that point.
(This isn’t attempting to reply to your comment in its entirety, just a few scattered thoughts in response.)
I think one can separate Frances’ concern into two issues:
The initial failure from her point of view to handle this appropriately, i.e., people read it and didn’t flag it as harassment and deal with it at that stage.
The secondary failure to handle it after she found out and felt hurt.
I think the idea that she has uniquely mischaracterised this document and subsequent failings seems to rely on it being true that the independent investigations are also similarly not representing things properly?
We can totally discard almost everything written in her post and it would still seem pretty obviously true that there was something deemed to be sexual harassment and an indentified failing to handle that appropriately. I think that is a pretty significant failure. I don’t know what level of failure to handle sexual harassment is typical (“within the range of mistakes real organizations make”). Given EA’s goals, I’d argue it’s okay to hold them to a high standard. I haven’t seen anyone is calling for CEA or any specific individual to be punished unusually. It’s important stories like this get shared publicly so that we can improve, and part of improvement does mean actually acknowledging mistakes properly.
An important flag too in my view is that I don’t think a document being written that was messy and poorly communicated is the issue in and of itself. I believe we should endorse people writing documents in a way that feels authentic to them and then it being on their manager for them to help communicate what they’re trying to say in the most productive way (I’ve had a previous manager describe part of their job as helping me take any issues I have in the raw, most honest form, and then turn them into more useful comments).
There’s nuance in all situations but I find that sometimes in EA we seek out nuance in ways that doesn’t actually always guide us towards improving as a community and instead can just make it very hard for people to voice problems. Of course, it is really important to think critically but that doesn’t actually have to be in the comments of a post like this.
Like many people, I’ve been following this thread with dismay. I think that Frances’s experiences sound terrible, and seem very unnecessary.
I have hesitated to weigh in on this thread. But I agree that the answers can’t just be at the policy level; and I’m keen to see further discussion about cultural dynamics which may contribute to the issues[1]. At this point I’ve given this question a good amount of thought (though I could definitely still be wrong), so I wanted to highlight a couple of things people might want to consider:
Focus on intent
I’m glad Frances calls this out as a problem, as I think it’s underappreciated as a contributing factor to problematic dynamics. I actually think it has more issues beyond what she lists.
A focus on intent:
Gets in the way of straightforwardly talking about what kinds of behaviour are good or bad
Moves attention from “person X had bad experiences; what happened there and how could they have been avoided?” to “is person Y bad?” (which is liable to lead to people coming to Y’s defence, in a way that risks invalidating X’s experiences)
Sends the (potentially dangerous) message “if your intentions are good, there’s nothing to worry about”
Distrust of moral intuitions
(caveat: not sure I’m naming the truest version of this; but I’m pretty sure there’s something in this vicinity)
I think EA teaches people that it’s important to think through the implications of our actions, rather than relying on unconsidered moral intuitions. Which is correct! But I worry that sometimes people can absorb this lesson too far, and start not paying attention to their own moral intuitions when they don’t have explicit arguments for them[2].
A friend put it to me as “I think sometimes EA accidentally encourages a lack of groundedness”.
Anyway it’s pure speculation on my part to imagine this at play in CEA’s (in)actions. But rather than imagine that the people reading Riley’s document didn’t feel any discomfort, I find it easier to imagine them feeling a little uncomfortable about it but not trusting the discomfort, or orienting in a locally-consequentialist way and guessing that it would ultimately create more costs and be worse (possibly including worse-for-Frances) to escalate it rather than leave it be.
TBC, I don’t think that the right amount of focus on intent or distrust of our own moral intuitions is zero! And I absolutely think that it’s possible to do these in ways that are healthy. But if I’m right, then I kind of want people to be tracking the potential vulnerabilities from going too far in these directions; so wanted to share. I’ll default to not posting more on this thread.
For the removal of any ambiguity, I’m not trying to disclaim personal responsibility for my own past mistakes! But when things go wrong to the degree of causing harm, I think they’ve often gone wrong at several levels at once; it’s useful to look at all of these.
It’s implausible if this is what happened that Riley would have provided a long detailed description of the rape rather than just mentioning it’s occurrence. If Frances was mischaracterizing the document so badly it didn’t contain such a description then Zachary could have said that and he hasn’t.
(comment deleted)
To begin with, it has not been established that Frances was the subject of the complaint. Two, raising a complaint does not give someone the right to comment on a colleague’s rape or on her mental health. If Riley had concerns about Frances, those concerns were potentially valid only to the extent they related to specific work-related behaviors.
So, for instance, it would be relevant for one employee to write that another employee was producing only 50 widgets an hour instead of 60. Speculating that the employee’s reduced performance was due to age, tendonitis, or sadness that they lost their dog would be unwarranted.[1] None of those things are the co-worker’s business.
Employees are not entitled to write whatever they want about their co-workers and get protected status as “complainants.” Especially when they have asked said co-worker out multiple times and been turned down; that raises the specter of a “complaint” as payback.[2]
Proper HR handling would have been for the first person to see the document to rip it up, tell Riley that his comments related to rape and mental health were wildly inappropriate, and tell him that if he wanted to raise concerns they needed to be strictly related to work-related behaviors.
This strikes me as an unwarranted demand for rigor. We have to make decisions based on the evidence that is available. This forum does not have power to subpoena documents or depose witnesses. Here, for instance, we do have the following considerations:
Frances’ narrative is quite specific (and acknowledges when she doesn’t have information, such as because CEA has so far refused to turn it over).
There are individuals and an organization who would have an incentive to controvert Frances’ statements if they were misleading—including CEA and its allies.
CEA has had an opportunity to respond, has done so, and hasn’t to my ears controverted the core elements of Frances’ statement. It apparently spent significant amounts of time and its donors money on investigation, so should be in a position to correct material misstatements. It already settled with Frances, so should be in a position to correct most misstatements she might have made without compromising any litigating position.
Frances has engaged with comments and skeptics, while CEA has stated that it is unable to do so.[3]
Frances left a post at CEA—one of the marquee jobs in the EA world—which is consistent with her characterization that something went very, very wrong here. I am not aware of any evidence that she did so for any other reason.
There is no dispute that independent investigations found in Frances’ favor here.
Several of Frances’ former colleagues at CEA have written supportive messages; those individuals are arguably in a better position to discern the truth than we are (and are unlikely to be biased against their current employer).
What additional evidence do you think is required and reasonably attainable here?
I’m deliberately picking an example that is clearly unrelated to Frances’ work tasks or Riley’s statements.
I decline to speculate on Riley’s motivation for writing, but I think it’s fair to assert that treating all complaints as privileged from disciplinary action facilitates payback for those who would like to obtain it.
CEA may have valid reasons for not doing so, and so I don’t want to score this too heavily. Yet there is no actual evidence that those reasons exist and are substantial, and I don’t think blind and total deference to an organization’s claim of inability is appropriate. So I am going to adjust slightly in favor of the reliability of Frances’ narrative based on her willingness to engage here.
I want to separate what people have a legally protected right to do and what I feel like they have a commonsense right to do. I have approximately no information other than what’s here about what actually went down between Riley, CEA, and Fran. But there are versions of “speculating about a coworker’s mental health” that I think are commonsense-reasonable, and to which I’m morally sympathetic, even if they might be imprudent and legally forbidden.
For example, I think that noticing that a co-worker is underperforming and speculating that the co-worker might be struggling and need extra support because you heard that their dog died recently and they seemed upset about it, can be the result of normal human sympathy and desire to raise relevant information. For example, it’s the kind of thing that I think a normal and well-intentioned person might raise if they noticed a friend of a friend or a cousin struggling.
I’m not saying that you should treat co-workers exactly the same, and there are no risks to doing so. Obviously there are. And I’m not saying anything about Riley-in-particular’s intentions here. I just think that having this kind of condemnatory attitude towards the entire class of behavior that involves ever raising information about potential causes of another’s struggles in a workplace feels like a really harsh and cold attitude towards workplace relationships, and I don’t like it.
Hi, Frances’ partner here. Just want to clarify/provide context for a few things.
Frances and Riley did not work on the same team and did not share any work projects, and didn’t work directly with each other. The only thing they used to share was a room in Trajan their teams used to both work out of. Soon after Frances learned about the existence of the document, she went to community health with concerns as she found it overwhelming to see him in the room she had to work in, and this resulted in community health separating the rooms the teams were working in (after which CEA asked them not to be involved further).
In the 9 months the document was circulated, no one (HR, exec, managers) reached out to Frances with concerns (behavioural or otherwise). We know multiple people were mentioned in the document. We don’t know (and may never know) if there were HR complaints made by Riley about Frances, but we can say for certain if there were complaints about Frances, no one thought it was necessary to mention to Frances.
In the summary of the document CEA provided, I read Riley describe how she was raped. This was more than what we initially thought, where we thought it was potentially much more tame , and thought he maybe said something like “she is a victim of sexual violence” based on how leadership was discussing the document with us. When I read the summary, I was shocked to see how descriptive it was. The “subsequent mental health crisis” that was discussed took place entirely out of the workplace, and Frances took medical leave. And when it did happen, we contacted multiple members of her team letting them know what happened and that she would be taking time off, and she communicated with her team and managers often about navigating work after the assault. I feel comfortable saying this document was not written due to concern for Frances’ wellbeing, given the document also says “I asked her out two times, but now I’m glad she said no”.
I also don’t know if there is missing context about the investigations so I will note the investigator pointed out that that he could not see a situation where writing this would be appropriate in his report. And this was after the investigator interviewed everyone involved, so all context was provided to the investigator. Unless both investigators are somehow deeply unqualified and lacking common sense, it stands to reason it did not make any sense to include. My interpretation of Zach’s comment and my private communication with him also leads me to believe he agrees, or he would not have asked Riley to leave the organisation. And reiterating Frances’ point earlier, Riley refused to apologize, and if you accidentally go too far when discussing someone, it is quite easy to apologize.
Note: Frances is probably going to take a break from this post but I’m happy to answer questions!
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For what it’s worth, I personally don’t believe leadership “knowingly” enabled sexual harassment and, importantly, the appeal report comes to that same conclusion. The investigator specifically reported he did not see any evidence that the managers “believed” there was sexual harassment occurring and turned a blind eye. But rather, that they did not identify it and did not take reasonable steps to prevent it, as required in the UK under the Worker Protection Act and their own policies (a point you seem to keep avoiding). I do not mean to lead anyone to a different conclusion, and I’m not currently concerned that I have in my post. I do believe they enabled harassment through negligence and ignorance, which is different.
I don’t think you’re representing my post very accurately. Further, I am not the comments nor can I control every conclusion readers come to. I think it would be both reasonable to want a leadership change after reading this and reasonable not to. Everyone has a different perspective on what they’d like to see from CEA and its leadership. I’d like to gently point out that the question here should never be, “is leadership bad and evil?” On a personal level, I basically like leadership. The frame here is: we are discussing a nonprofit funded by philanthropic dollars meant to represent a community that is literally about altruism.
Let me be very clear: it took enormous effort on my part to achieve this. It is standard for organisation’s to pay for legal representation when attempting to pursue a settlement. In the UK, I wouldn’t have been able to sign the settlement without representation, so that was a necessary step. It was in the organisation’s best interest to settle, because the alternative is that I bring an employment tribunal claim. I do respect their willingness to forego a confidentiality clause, but again, this may not have been purely selfless. I was unwilling to sign a settlement agreement unless they obliged. You can imagine, it would be worse to have no claim waiver and no confidentiality (i.e. I can bring a claim still) than to have a claim waiver with no confidentiality (i.e. I cannot bring a claim).
If I have been at all factually incorrect or misleading, I would strongly encourage CEA to say so. Leadership is very welcome to email me to run statements by me if they are concerned about the reputational risk of correcting me. And then, they can say, “we are issuing x corrections, we have Frances’ full support,” or whatever it may be. Personally, I feel I have been very careful and accurate. I quote the appeal report directly for this very reason.
I never discuss Riley’s intent, nor will I. But I will point out, he was unwilling to apologise. I find your framing of “clumsiness” incongruent with this. If the sexual harassment was “clumsy,” he could simply say, “I apologise for the sexual harassment and the impact it had, which was unintentional.” He could do so while still standing by whatever else he deemed necessary in the document. And yet, he declined to do that and continues to refuse (to my best understanding, unless he secretly really wants to apologise but has somehow found himself unable and CEA has somehow failed to inform me of this fact).
There would be some legal risk for rejecting certain kinds of complaints without any action—such as a legally protected complaint that an employee was being subjected to harassment themselves. But there is no evidence that Riley’s complaint about one or more of his co-workers fell into any legally protected category, and it is difficult for me to envision how it would be.
And even if it were necessary to maintain the original complaint on file, you redact the material that constitutes sexual and disability harassment of another employee before broader circulation. It is not “messy” to figure out what portions relate to a legally protected grounds for complaint somewhere before you expose 11 people (over 20% of the company) to the harassing content.
“Most of what Frances characterizes as institutional failure, not telling her and not acting against Riley, is actually consistent with proper HR handling.” A Worker Protection Act breach is proper HR handling in the UK?
“I think the simpler explanation is that the document didn’t read the way she describes it.” It was determined to be harassment and then sexual harassment by two independent investigators.
“too much personal detail.” this seems generous to the point of being misleading.
“We’re asked to believe that HR, legal, the CEO, the COO, and multiple managers all independently failed a basic moral test.” this is effectively confirmed by the investigation findings, yes.
“Everything we know comes from fragments read aloud from memory by a colleague, relayed months later in a post written as advocacy.” And from the investigation outcomes? Are you imagining a document that is determined to be sexual harassment in an investigation, that is actually very mild and defensible? What do you think sexual harassment is?
“If Riley was complaining about behavioral issues connected to Frances’s trauma.” This is not the case, to my knowledge. If he was doing so, CEA is welcome to inform me. Again, if this was an HR complaint about me, I have not been contacted regarding anything to that effect. There are no “behavioural issues connected to my trauma.”
“She herself acknowledges worsening PTSD and difficulty functioning, then providing that context in a complaint isn’t sexualization” what a disgustingly sexist thing to say. My difficulty functioning was with respect to focusing at work and managing my stress levels, nothing more. Again, the complaint was determined to be sexual harassment. There is no world in which you would ever need to describe someone being raped. Ever.
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There is absolutely no necessity for anyone to be “monsters” in order for the picture painted in Frances post to be accurate and her anger justified though.
All your contributions in this thread seem to be marked by the idea that people would have to be unusually bad in some way to fail to deal well with sexual harassment. But I don’t see why we should be particularly confident that the base rate of orgs dealing badly with sexual misconduct, in ways that-*correctly*-look really bad to outsiders when the facts come out is all that low. There have been numerous cases where schools, universities, religious institutions etc. have covered up far worse conduct than Riley’s: i.e. sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church as one example among many. Now, of course, we typically don’t hear about the cases where sexual harassment or abuse was promptly identified and the perpetrator fired/imprisoned, unless the perpetrator was independently famous. And there are a lot of people and institutions in the world, so maybe those cases are way more common. But I don’t see any particular reason to be confident of that.
More importantly. this isn’t even EA’s first scandal where a major org themselves admitted they dealt badly with sexual misconduct: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4CBoJ5jgmGfdMFnAE/ev-investigation-into-owen-and-community-health In the face of that, I don’t see why we should find it particularly implausible that in another case, an EA org dealt badly with sexual misconduct.
But also, people are generally very good at avoiding believing things that are extremely inconvenient for them, without really noticing they are doing it, and without conscious malice. Most of us are much better at doing this in my view than we think we are. When HR originally received Riley’s doc, they had a choice between 1) trying to start sexual harassment proceedings against him, and 2) overlooking the fact that what he had written about Frances was wholly inappropriate, and possibly malicious, and concentrating on his own complaints. Doing 2) was no doubt made easier by the fact that the doc was apparently not “about” Frances specifically. Now, if they took choice 1), that was a lot of hassle and unpleasantness for them:
A) Potentially having to directly punish Riley. People don’t generally like significantly deliberately harming people they know, and have no personal beef with, and will avoid it if they can. This is maybe especially true of the kind of friendly people personish person who wants to work in HR, although that is only a guess on my part.
B) Having to deal with Riley potentially portraying any investigation of him as retaliatory for his complaints. Even a completely baseless accusation of that is likely to be a huge stress for the people on the receiving end of it. This is likely to have been particularly unpleasant with the kind of person who writes a massive doc giving his detailed personal opinions on multiple colleagues, including for at least one person their mental health, sexual victimization and his own romantic feelings for them, because anyone who does something that inappropriate and obsessive can’t be trust to act normally during a complaints process. This is true even if Riley is in fact a vulnerable, naive person with no malicious intentions, let alone if he is actually vengeful.
C) Having to either upset Frances by informing her about the doc, and having an excruciatingly awkward conversation with her about it, or alternatively NOT inform her even while disciplining Riley, and admit to themselves that they are concealing from Frances that one of her colleagues has sexually harassed her.
On the other hand, if they take choice 2) and just fail to recognize how inappropriate the stuff Riley said about Frances was, then they can realistically hope that Frances never finds out, and they don’t have to upset Riley or Frances, or having any awkward conversations about rape and sexualization of rape victims with anyone or face the consequences of being accused or retaliating against a complainant. They could just hope that Frances never found out about the doc, something that may well have happened if Riley himself had not shown it beyond HR. (Unless the person who informed Frances was themselves in HR anyway). Then they could avoid any stress or hurt feelings. Once the CEO and the COO found out, they also had the same incentives to get this wrong, but with the additional incentive that they could decide to defer to HR’s judgments, since they are the orgs experts on well, HR issues.
I say all this not to excuse anyone at CEA. If this is the psychological dynamics of what happened-which I obviously don’t know-that’s not all that exculpatory. Not dealing with sexual harassment properly because you want to avoid awkwardness/fuss/punishment and you’re in HR or management, is like not running into a burning building as a firefighter because you don’t want to get burnt: it’s your job to get past this stuff! But claims that Frances’ account requires an implausible level of malice or incompetence on the part of multiple people seem wrong to me..
Under section 26 of the Equality Act 2010, harassment occurs when “the conduct has the purpose or effect of—(i) violating B’s dignity, or (ii) creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for B.” In considering whether the conduct has such an effect, “each of the following must be taken into account—(a) the perception of B; (b) the other circumstances of the case; (c) whether it is reasonable for the conduct to have that effect.”
See also section 1.28 of this guidance. So there is an objective element to the test, and relevant circumstances must be considered. So I think it is fair to infer that the external reviewer concluded that it was reasonable for Frances to conclude that the conduct violated her dignity or created an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. I also think it is fair to infer that the external reviewer concluded that the other circumstances of the case were not inconsistent with a finding of harassment. That would be easy; there is no legitimate reason for a co-worker to be circulating a memo about another co-worker’s rape or mental health.
I submit that there is a sliding scale of moral credit for acceptance of responsibility based on timeliness (also true in the UK criminal justice system). These actions came awfully late for me to give too much credit here, especially to the extent that they came after Frances expressed that she would be going public. They could be construed as damage control—the reputational risk of litigation in which documents would come out and those involved would have to testify under oath would dwarf the risk of an EA Forum post. Even without a confidentiality agreement, a settlement is much quieter than the alternative.
(I am glad that we have a lawyer to resolve any ‘I am not a lawyer but…’ comments on here)
“You say the behavioral complaints weren’t connected to your trauma” No, I’m saying there were no behavioural issues ever discussed with me. Thus, there were no substantiated behavioural issues. I don’t know what the document says, exactly.
“You yourself acknowledge worsening PTSD symptoms and difficulty functioning at work during this period.” If you read the post, you’ll see that my PTSD symptoms worsened as a result of the document being written and circulated, and CEA’s lack of response (i.e. after the document was already written).
“but it may be considerably more technical than the way it’s being invoked in this thread.” This seems to imply there is a difference between “technical” sexual harassment and some other definition of sexual harassment, in your mind, that is more egregious. In such a case, what would change your mind here? You would have to read the document and description of my rape yourself?
“But an organization that waived confidentiality, paid for your lawyer, never attempted to silence you, and whose CEO gave you what you yourself describe as a genuine apology is not staffed by monsters.” Certainly. I say the same thing in my post. I never imply anyone at CEA is a monster, nor do I hold that belief. Not at all. Though, I do stand by my section on cowardice. I can understand us having different opinions on that front.
Where in Zach’s comment did he confirm this? He said:
”In the fall of 2024, Riley went to HR with the document Frances references to share complaints about a colleague’s behavior. Those concerns were the focus of Riley’s writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didn’t share) it.” This doesn’t confirm that the complaints were about Frances?
Can you clarify exactly what you’re claiming is explicable to be included as context? Zach’s comment said, “Sharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleague’s sexual assault”. Frances said, “But further, it was more than that. He didn’t neutrally “disclose” it in a single, non-specific sentence. He wrote a description of me being raped. He describes it. He muses and speculates about my subsequent mental health crisis.”
Cowardice was largely a description of other people deferring to leadership, but minor quibble aside, these two claims are not mutually exclusive! The folks involved can be reasonably and fairly perceived to be cowardly, indifferent, and complicit to harms, while also getting things wrong, and also not staffed by ‘monsters’.
I would be much more sympathetic to this if it wasn’t for the case that two independent investigations subsequently flagged this as harassment/sexual harassment, including CEA’s own legal team, and the apparently massive shift in behaviour after Frances opted for public accountability.
It’s entirely reasonable for someone to submit an HR complaint, and it’s entirely reasonable for you guess that Riley was well intentioned and clumsy rather than malevolent. But it’s not clear to me what your interpretation of the post’s framing is. From my perspective, Frances hasn’t made any claims about Riley’s intent, but just the impact that the circulation of this document.
To be clear, I don’t think that the focus on Riley’s intention meaningfully changes the mistakes at CEA here! I’d type more on this, but here’s a good passage on that point.
(This isn’t attempting to reply to your comment in its entirety, just a few scattered thoughts in response.)
I think one can separate Frances’ concern into two issues:
The initial failure from her point of view to handle this appropriately, i.e., people read it and didn’t flag it as harassment and deal with it at that stage.
The secondary failure to handle it after she found out and felt hurt.
I think the idea that she has uniquely mischaracterised this document and subsequent failings seems to rely on it being true that the independent investigations are also similarly not representing things properly?
We can totally discard almost everything written in her post and it would still seem pretty obviously true that there was something deemed to be sexual harassment and an indentified failing to handle that appropriately. I think that is a pretty significant failure. I don’t know what level of failure to handle sexual harassment is typical (“within the range of mistakes real organizations make”). Given EA’s goals, I’d argue it’s okay to hold them to a high standard. I haven’t seen anyone is calling for CEA or any specific individual to be punished unusually. It’s important stories like this get shared publicly so that we can improve, and part of improvement does mean actually acknowledging mistakes properly.
An important flag too in my view is that I don’t think a document being written that was messy and poorly communicated is the issue in and of itself. I believe we should endorse people writing documents in a way that feels authentic to them and then it being on their manager for them to help communicate what they’re trying to say in the most productive way (I’ve had a previous manager describe part of their job as helping me take any issues I have in the raw, most honest form, and then turn them into more useful comments).
There’s nuance in all situations but I find that sometimes in EA we seek out nuance in ways that doesn’t actually always guide us towards improving as a community and instead can just make it very hard for people to voice problems. Of course, it is really important to think critically but that doesn’t actually have to be in the comments of a post like this.
I would go further, and say that given CEA’s specific history and promises of change around sexual harassment[1], we should hold them to an even higher standard than that.
CEA was and is a member organisation of EV UK, and the findings partially concerned CEA’s Community Health Team
I am sympathetic to this.
Like many people, I’ve been following this thread with dismay. I think that Frances’s experiences sound terrible, and seem very unnecessary.
I have hesitated to weigh in on this thread. But I agree that the answers can’t just be at the policy level; and I’m keen to see further discussion about cultural dynamics which may contribute to the issues[1]. At this point I’ve given this question a good amount of thought (though I could definitely still be wrong), so I wanted to highlight a couple of things people might want to consider:
Focus on intent
I’m glad Frances calls this out as a problem, as I think it’s underappreciated as a contributing factor to problematic dynamics. I actually think it has more issues beyond what she lists.
A focus on intent:
Gets in the way of straightforwardly talking about what kinds of behaviour are good or bad
Moves attention from “person X had bad experiences; what happened there and how could they have been avoided?” to “is person Y bad?” (which is liable to lead to people coming to Y’s defence, in a way that risks invalidating X’s experiences)
Sends the (potentially dangerous) message “if your intentions are good, there’s nothing to worry about”
Distrust of moral intuitions
(caveat: not sure I’m naming the truest version of this; but I’m pretty sure there’s something in this vicinity)
I think EA teaches people that it’s important to think through the implications of our actions, rather than relying on unconsidered moral intuitions. Which is correct! But I worry that sometimes people can absorb this lesson too far, and start not paying attention to their own moral intuitions when they don’t have explicit arguments for them[2].
A friend put it to me as “I think sometimes EA accidentally encourages a lack of groundedness”.
Anyway it’s pure speculation on my part to imagine this at play in CEA’s (in)actions. But rather than imagine that the people reading Riley’s document didn’t feel any discomfort, I find it easier to imagine them feeling a little uncomfortable about it but not trusting the discomfort, or orienting in a locally-consequentialist way and guessing that it would ultimately create more costs and be worse (possibly including worse-for-Frances) to escalate it rather than leave it be.
TBC, I don’t think that the right amount of focus on intent or distrust of our own moral intuitions is zero! And I absolutely think that it’s possible to do these in ways that are healthy. But if I’m right, then I kind of want people to be tracking the potential vulnerabilities from going too far in these directions; so wanted to share. I’ll default to not posting more on this thread.
For the removal of any ambiguity, I’m not trying to disclaim personal responsibility for my own past mistakes! But when things go wrong to the degree of causing harm, I think they’ve often gone wrong at several levels at once; it’s useful to look at all of these.
Or further: discount their own sense of right and wrong in order to defer to people who’ve thought about things more.
It’s implausible if this is what happened that Riley would have provided a long detailed description of the rape rather than just mentioning it’s occurrence. If Frances was mischaracterizing the document so badly it didn’t contain such a description then Zachary could have said that and he hasn’t.