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.
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!
(comment deleted)
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.