I want to begin by apologizing to Frances. I recognize that she experienced real harm from action and inaction taken by people at CEA, including me, and I wish we had gotten this right from the beginning without Frances needing to advocate for herself at such personal cost. Sexual harassment has no place at CEA or in EA more broadly, CEA made substantial mistakes, and it is important that we do better in the future.
I appreciate that Frances and other readers desire more transparency about what happened here. I want to share some additional context because I want to fully acknowledge the nature of how CEA made certain mistakes and how we need to act differently in the future. I also want to acknowledge there are frustrating legal limitations on what I can share, and by default I will be unable to engage with comments or questions that require further disclosure. To be clear, in no way is any of the information I am sharing intended to change the fact that I fully believe CEA made serious mistakes, for which I am very sorry.
In the fall of 2024, Riley went to HR with the document Frances references to share complaints about a colleagueâs behavior. Those concerns were the focus of Rileyâs writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didnât share) it. We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
It is now clear the ways in which our approach was too limited, too focused on following a standard HR process, and insufficiently proactive in recognizing the harmful nature of the contents included with the complaints. The focus on evaluating Rileyâs concerns meant multiple staff members made a significant error when they did not identify and investigate the inappropriate and excessive content included within his document. Sharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleagueâs sexual assault. It was not until Frances first approached the Legal Team in August 2025 to express concerns about the contents of the document that we launched an investigation. CEA should have proactively initiated this investigation sooner, without requiring Frances to act first. Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate during what was an already difficult time. I also want to recognize the ways in which poor communication from CEA staff may have contributed to an experience of feeling like an individual needing to navigate a cold bureaucracy, which could have added to the emotional difficulty of this experience and left Frances feeling uncared for rather than supported. These are real failures for which I am deeply sorry, and I want to name them clearly.
While we cannot unwind the harm that has already occurred, it is important to me that CEA learns and makes improvements to prevent similar incidents from happening again. The forward-looking recommendation from the report was to implement training (which we have begun in multiple forms), but I think it is naive to believe traditional HR trainings would address every issue. In particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. Weâre laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way). I also recognize laying groundwork means we are far from the desired end state, and that we will need to work hard to improve instead of offering quick fix solutions. The burden to act should never have been on Frances, and CEA needs to do a better job living up to its values.
Frances, Iâm sorry. You deserved better from us.
Hello Zach. If I may provide my initial reaction up front: CEA failed to uphold the Worker Protection Act and enabled sexual harassment, as determined by an independent investigator, because you were too focused on following a standard HR process? That seems impossible. Riley initially shared the document with five people, and in the end it was shared with at least 11. Thatâs not a confidential HR complaint, itâs a circulated internal document.
Zach, I spent months working on the above post. But as you know, I also wrote several internal documents to a similar effect. At least two were shared with you. Itâs depressing to see that CEAâs response has barely evolved. It contains more apologies now, often echoing my own empathetic language back to me, but it still fails to contain any meaningful information.
I appealed to the board, even after months of swallowing my disgust at what was occurring. I did this because I wanted CEA to finally be able to say something meaningful about what happened. Iâve been working in EA for six years now, I worked on EA Global for three years. I care deeply and I want things to get better. Right now, Iâve been offered what reads to me as: âWe were singularly focused on Rileyâs complaint, in a way that is relatable, even if it was a serious mistake.â
It isnât relatable at all, not to me. You personally read a description of my rape without my consent and did absolutely nothing. For months, I continued working as though that didnât make me deeply uncomfortable, nervous, confused, and embarrassed. You interacted with me like nothing had occurred. I did deserve better and I still deserve better than,âwe were focussed on HR process in a mistaken way.â Thatâs not an answer to me. To me, it is completely illogical. I did sincerely appreciate the call with you in that, I believe you are regretful and I have absolutely no personal qualms with you outside of this situation. But in the context of your role as CEO, I am so deeply disappointed still.
I no longer expect answers to the questions I have posed internally. But for the record, I will restate them. Below is why I have failed to gain any confidence in CEAâs current leadership.
On the document:
âSharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleagueâs sexual assault.â Yes, of course. Iâm very sad CEA could not arrive at this conclusion themselves. But further, it was more than that. He didnât neutrally âdiscloseâ 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 (which was unrelated to work; I went on three weeks of medical leave following the assault). Even the sanitized summary CEA drafted, with his âpersonal feelingsâ removed, was deeply disturbing to read. It was also multiple pages. I understand it was not the âfocusâ of the document, but it is much more than one line that states âFrances was rapedâ. To my understanding, the document itself is just extremely long and discusses multiple employees and community members at length. I cannot understand how that did not immediately result in me being notified and the matter being referred to legal for investigation.
[Edit: adding the following paragraph] Youâve also said it was unfortunate I had to be proactive. Iâd like to point out that based on CEAâs formal processes, I would never have had the chance to report. I would never have known about the document. I only knew about it because one of the recipients went against leadership and informed me. You and the other recipients were the only people that could have done anything, and it is very likely to me that if she had not notified me about this document, it would still be in circulation today without my knowledge. On a human level, did any of you feel even a little worried after reading it? Or concerned/âempathetic? Did anyone raise a flag? Anyone?
On the change in outcomes:
Why did the investigation outcomes change so drastically after the appeal? At first, Riley remained with the organisation, could continue working out of CEAâs Oxford office, and could attend all events, and we were given walking paths and designated meal times. After the appeal, Iâm told that CEA âinitiated a processâ which led to his resignation, which I am interpreting as him being pushed out of the organisation. What substantively changed? To my knowledge, only two significant things differed: my stated intention to write publicly. Second, I had begun discussing the situation with a male, more senior, and respected member of the community who reached out to you directly to express deep concern. I donât know of any other changes, though Iâd like to if any exist. To my understanding, I will not be able to get clarity here.
Hey Zach, thanks for the response. I know you are unlikely to be able to reply to this with anything meaningfully helpful, and this might be frustrating for you, but I just wanted to flag some things that from the outside seem at minimum incongruous.
Iâve typed this quickly and without visibility into all of the considerations and information you have, so apologies in advance if this is more uncharitable than youâd like. (emphasis in quotes added)
Those concerns were the focus of Rileyâs writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didnât share) it. We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
Sorry but presumably:
CEAâs obligation as an employer to evaluate complaints seriously also applies to Frances?
CEAâs obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Francesâ experiences in the doc?
an employee raising concerns about something doesnât shield them from all misconduct or harassment during the process of raising the concern?
What about the chilling effect of staff not feeling comfortable raising HR concerns, or even working in your organisation because empirically CEA donât seem to take harassment /â sexual harassment sufficiently seriously? Does the idea that multiple managers, HR, CEO, and COO of an organisation can allow a sexualised description of an employeeâs rape (etc) to be spread in the organisation without their consent, disregard an offer from the community health team to step in, and take ~no actions for 9 months not seem like it might have some kind of a chilling effect (or more)? I recognise that itâs important for HR concerns to be evaluated seriously but it feels like this standard wasnât applied in any meaningful way to Frances?
It is now clear the ways in which our approach was too limited, too focused on following a standard HR process, and insufficiently proactive in recognizing the harmful nature of the contents included with the complaints.
I hope you appreciate that itâs difficult to take this statement seriously; it really doesnât seem like the issue here is that CEA was following a standard HR process, both during the 9 months, as well as after the complaint.
What standard HR processes include âdesignated walking pathsâ and âassigned meal timesâ as appropriate responses? Alternatively, it seems like CEAâs âstandard HR processâ does not capture the fact that the kind of content circulated might very obviously be considered a separate HR issue? (I recognise you explicitly name some of these failings afterwards and I donât want to discount that, I just separately donât really think itâs very convincing that HR was âtoo focussed on following a standard processâ is a good excuse /â representation of what happened, and wanted to call that out.[1]
CEA should have proactively initiated this investigation sooner, without requiring Frances to act first. Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate during what was an already difficult time...
Fair enough! Sorry if Iâm reading too much into what might just be ~boilerplate. But acknowledging just the start time of the investigation makes it sound like you agree that this investigation should have been done, and once Frances advocated for this you took this seriously[2] (perhaps bar some âcommunication issuesâ that you acknowlege).
But if:
CEAâs own legal team decided this was harassment
you later acknowledge[3] that creating a culture that prevents/âaddresses sexual harassment included staffing changes such as removing Riley, etc;
Then why did CEA propose things like âdesignated walking pathsâ and âassigned meal timesâ the first time round, instead of just taking action at that stage? This doesnât seem like itâs just an issue of âCEA wasnât proactive about initiating this investigationâ, but also one where it didnât take the investigation or HR processes for Frances appropriately seriously! Also, this does not appear to just an issue of Riley, or of HR here. This document allegedly crossed multiple managers, as well as your, and the COOâs desk! Should readers be concluding that somehow none of the people involved considered taking further action? Or that they did take more actions and it didnât go anywhere? Or something else?
To be more explicit, right now it doesnât seem like thereâs any public information I can draw on to rule out something like âCEA took actions that appear consistent with them being motivated more by protecting themselves from legal and reputational risk, rather than because they are primarily interested in the wellbeing of their employeesâ.[4]
Given the seriousness of the situation I hope you understand me holding you to the public standard rather than base this off any positive personal interactions I may have had with you and any other CEA staff!
I also recognize laying groundwork means we are far from the desired end state, and that we will need to work hard to improve instead of offering quick fix solutions.
Part of the issue here is that even the groundwork that has already been laid did not help in this case right? Whatâs the reason the EA community, or prospective employees, should trust that things are different this time around?
âIn particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. Weâre laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way).â
I received this in my DMs and am sharing anonymously on their behalf:
Zach says: âFailing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate âŠâ, but this seems to be obscuring the fact that she wouldnât even have had a chance to self-advocate if it hadnât been for some member of staff (presumably against CEA policy) sharing the existence of the doc with her. I wonder why this wasnât addressed in the reflections.
Indeed, why is it that when someone did have concerns the thing they did was to partially disclose things to Frances rather than raise it within CEA? This does seem to suggest that people reading the document could feel worried about it, and also might be suggestive of issues with internal culture. I feel a bit worried that this isnât a part of what CEA appear to be taking responsibility for addressing.
CEAâs obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Francesâ experiences in the doc?
The sharing of the document with people who probably shouldnât have seen it seems to have primarily been done by Riley in the original narrative (which is inappropriate, to be clear). The original post says that the people CEAâs HR shared it with was the COO and legal team. That seems appropriate to have done including in cases where CEA handled this well, as they would be the people evaluating if harassment occured and how to respond.
It sounds like a lot of really bad things happened in this case, and it may have been handled really poorly, but I donât think from the narrative that has been presented so far there is strong evidence it was shared inappropriately by anyone except Riley (though of course if the description of the contents is accurate, Riley sharing it is a form of harassment).
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
âIf the description is accurate.â The document is unequivocally harassment, as determined by two independent investigators. This is not disputable.
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least thereâs no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/âits author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Yeah so I think they still have strong HR confidentiality obligations regardless of which staff Riley personally shares the document with, but I think at that point it is no longer strictly a âconfidential HR complaintâ and calling it such is an obfuscation on CEAâs part. Rileyâs conduct also immediately triggers obligations to me under both GDPR and the Worker Protection Act. So I think it basically separates into two distinct issues: Rileyâs complaint, whatever it was, and then his conduct within the document itself towards me (harassment). I think CEA should basically have treated these as almost independent events, even though they exist within one document.
If Riley had truly only shared it with HR, I think thatâs probably still bad but itâs also completely manageable. The flow could be something like: one person, HR, receives document â identifies potential harassment and GDPR violation â sends back something like, âdo not share this document further, I intend to quarantine it. Please rewrite your document to exclude any personal information about other employees. We will now need to treat this as two separate issues. First, the complaint youâre disclosing, which is your right to do and which we take seriously. Second, the additional conduct in the document, as it pertains to other employees, which we will need to address separately as it does not constitute a complaint.â
At the point itâs shared outside HR, the whole thing changes and I felt like I couldnât seem to get that message across internally, even though it feels so obvious to me. Not to mention that the CEO is, well, the CEO. Everyone is in their direct reporting line. I was at the same reporting level to the CEO as Riley, and he had now read explicit sexual content about me without my consent or knowledge. That just seems so obviously indefensible and bad that I sometimes feel like Iâm losing it.
Youâre not losing it: it is obviously indefensible. I think youâve provided more than enough information to make this clear, and anybody who doesnât get it at this point is probably not worth your time engaging with.
You can ask the following question to any chatbot and you will get the same answer:
I work in HR. Employee A has sent me a long complaint about the conduct of another employee B. However, inside the complaint, employee A has included a detailed description of the sexual activities of a different employee C, which is unrelated to the company. What should I do?
I tested this on Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, and every single one urged me to separate the complaint from the sexual content and redact the sensitive information. And this is a much tamer situation than the one that actually happened!
They could have literally just asked a chatbot what to do, and it would have done a better job than their professional HR department.
One thing it might be useful for people to look at here when reflecting on the causes of the failure was how much experience the HR team had of working outside of EA organizations. If the answer is âvery littleâ then maybe bringing in more experienced non-EA pros would help, but if the answer is âa decent amountâ itâs less likely that will prevent future errors on its own.
We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
To be clear, your organisation also had obligations not to spread around documents describing an employees experience of rape. A quick clauding points to GDPR protections against sharing âdata concerning a natural personâs sex lifeâ . Iâm not a lawyer but it seems like HR had a clear obligation to redact those parts of the complaint before sending it to the COO and other people, which didnât happen. And to state the obvious, concerns of a âchilling effectâ were unwarranted here: a standard of âyou can complain about your colleague as long as you donât sexual harrass someoneâ is pretty understandable to everyone.
Iâm glad that you have gained understanding about the serious mistakes that your organisation made. I remain horrified that it took so long for you to reach this understanding.
I want to raise a concern about the bigger picture that feels important here, which Iâm sharing cautiously because I donât know all the details.
From the public account, it appears that Rileyâs document was circulated among multiple members of leadership and discussed internally for months before Frances was even aware of it, so by the time she entered the process, leadership had already been exposed to (and potentially biased toward) one narrative in detail.
Even if everyone involved was acting in good faith, that kind of sequencing can create a significant imbalance because the other person is unknowingly placed in a defensive position. I imagine I would feel overwhelmed, shocked, and powerless when I found out what had been taking place without my knowledge.
In addition, in situations where there has been prior romantic interest /â rejection, I worry there is a risk of retaliatory motivations. Iâm not asserting that this definitively occurred here, but given the publicly known facts, that there was romantic pursuit, rejection, and a complaint including (unempathetic and callous) speculation about mental health and a description of a rape, I think itâs reasonable for yellow flags to be raised.
I would want to understand: âą Was the inclusion of sexualized and highly personal material treated as a red flag in itself? âą Did anyone consider how the process creates a big information asymmetry that centers one partyâs perspective before the other has a chance to respond? âą Were people aware that when prior interpersonal tensions exist (especially romantic and gendered ones), there is a risk of prematurely treating one party as the problem?
To me, neutrality is not the only concern. Holistic appraisal of the situation is probably even more important. I raise this publicly because I hope that discussion of these risk patterns can help prevent harmful events from playing out in the future.
I am responding completely in a personal capacity and not as a representative of CEA.
Others have touched on why this response feels unsatisfying, but on a meta level, Iâm not sure responding in this level of detail was the right call. The additional context doesnât really contradict Francesâs account and it mostly reframes things in ways that, intentionally or not, read as defensive. If CEA genuinely accepts that it made serious mistakes, I think the stronger move would have been a shorter, clearer apology without any explanatory scaffolding.
I also really hope Frances was informed that this response would be posted and, ideally, shown the specific contents beforehand. Based on her reply, that doesnât appear to be the case. Publishing a detailed public explanation of your side of someoneâs account of being sexually harassed at your organisation without any notification seems like a pretty significant misstep on its own.
Itâs shocking you/âCEA didnât see a victim cancellation document for what it was.
EA has a documented cultural problem, from the TIME magazine article to what happened to Kathy Forth and beyond. Your organization is embedded in that culture and needs to set an example. If the substantive change is âhiring a new HR managerâ, it is not good enough.
I urge and implore you to seek expertise outside of EA and your organization that has experience in dealing with these issues, and to be transparent about their findings. If Leverage Research could do it, so can CEA.
The exceptionalism inherent in EA /â rat communities leads to actions that work out to corrupt police departments investigating themselves and it really needs to stop.
This seems to exemplify the problem I have with most EA organizations. They are often run by people who are young, with great talent, but no serious prior experience. I donât assume malevolence from Zach, and think the most probable explanation is that he (like many at EA orgs) didnât know the basics about what not to do while running a company. I donât say that to be mean. But anyone with experience would understand immediately that this constituted sexual harassment under US Law and violated the Worker Protection Act. I fear EAs are prone to do everything their own way, without thought of why existing norms and structures are there in the first place. This is one of the reasons other companies often promote by seniority. They have the experience and understanding needed to see the obvious. This is the sort of thing that would be so extremely obvious to someone with decades of experience. Do other companies have worse scandals? Yes. But I think the number of scandals in EA orgs that surround ânot seeing or doing the obvious thingâ is much higher than average.
Experience has nothing to do with it. I have zero CEO or HR experience and itâs extremely obvious to me too. EA might have a higher rate of ânot seeing or doing the obvious thingâ because there is usually a blind spot in assessing the âEââthat is âEffectivenessâ of the altruism. One blind spot doesnât exist alone...
This reply, given the context, is unbelievable. You, and the entire CEA leadership, should resign. There should not be a place for what your organization did in the 21st century; there are no words to describe how much it is a failure of everything CEA was supposed to stand for that it is CEA where it happened, and that this is your response.
I want to begin by apologizing to Frances. I recognize that she experienced real harm from action and inaction taken by people at CEA, including me, and I wish we had gotten this right from the beginning without Frances needing to advocate for herself at such personal cost. Sexual harassment has no place at CEA or in EA more broadly, CEA made substantial mistakes, and it is important that we do better in the future.
I appreciate that Frances and other readers desire more transparency about what happened here. I want to share some additional context because I want to fully acknowledge the nature of how CEA made certain mistakes and how we need to act differently in the future. I also want to acknowledge there are frustrating legal limitations on what I can share, and by default I will be unable to engage with comments or questions that require further disclosure. To be clear, in no way is any of the information I am sharing intended to change the fact that I fully believe CEA made serious mistakes, for which I am very sorry.
In the fall of 2024, Riley went to HR with the document Frances references to share complaints about a colleagueâs behavior. Those concerns were the focus of Rileyâs writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didnât share) it. We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
It is now clear the ways in which our approach was too limited, too focused on following a standard HR process, and insufficiently proactive in recognizing the harmful nature of the contents included with the complaints. The focus on evaluating Rileyâs concerns meant multiple staff members made a significant error when they did not identify and investigate the inappropriate and excessive content included within his document. Sharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleagueâs sexual assault. It was not until Frances first approached the Legal Team in August 2025 to express concerns about the contents of the document that we launched an investigation. CEA should have proactively initiated this investigation sooner, without requiring Frances to act first. Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate during what was an already difficult time. I also want to recognize the ways in which poor communication from CEA staff may have contributed to an experience of feeling like an individual needing to navigate a cold bureaucracy, which could have added to the emotional difficulty of this experience and left Frances feeling uncared for rather than supported. These are real failures for which I am deeply sorry, and I want to name them clearly.
While we cannot unwind the harm that has already occurred, it is important to me that CEA learns and makes improvements to prevent similar incidents from happening again. The forward-looking recommendation from the report was to implement training (which we have begun in multiple forms), but I think it is naive to believe traditional HR trainings would address every issue. In particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. Weâre laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way). I also recognize laying groundwork means we are far from the desired end state, and that we will need to work hard to improve instead of offering quick fix solutions. The burden to act should never have been on Frances, and CEA needs to do a better job living up to its values.
Frances, Iâm sorry. You deserved better from us.
Hello Zach. If I may provide my initial reaction up front: CEA failed to uphold the Worker Protection Act and enabled sexual harassment, as determined by an independent investigator, because you were too focused on following a standard HR process? That seems impossible. Riley initially shared the document with five people, and in the end it was shared with at least 11. Thatâs not a confidential HR complaint, itâs a circulated internal document.
Zach, I spent months working on the above post. But as you know, I also wrote several internal documents to a similar effect. At least two were shared with you. Itâs depressing to see that CEAâs response has barely evolved. It contains more apologies now, often echoing my own empathetic language back to me, but it still fails to contain any meaningful information.
I appealed to the board, even after months of swallowing my disgust at what was occurring. I did this because I wanted CEA to finally be able to say something meaningful about what happened. Iâve been working in EA for six years now, I worked on EA Global for three years. I care deeply and I want things to get better. Right now, Iâve been offered what reads to me as: âWe were singularly focused on Rileyâs complaint, in a way that is relatable, even if it was a serious mistake.â
It isnât relatable at all, not to me. You personally read a description of my rape without my consent and did absolutely nothing. For months, I continued working as though that didnât make me deeply uncomfortable, nervous, confused, and embarrassed. You interacted with me like nothing had occurred. I did deserve better and I still deserve better than,âwe were focussed on HR process in a mistaken way.â Thatâs not an answer to me. To me, it is completely illogical. I did sincerely appreciate the call with you in that, I believe you are regretful and I have absolutely no personal qualms with you outside of this situation. But in the context of your role as CEO, I am so deeply disappointed still.
I no longer expect answers to the questions I have posed internally. But for the record, I will restate them. Below is why I have failed to gain any confidence in CEAâs current leadership.
On the document:
âSharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleagueâs sexual assault.â Yes, of course. Iâm very sad CEA could not arrive at this conclusion themselves. But further, it was more than that. He didnât neutrally âdiscloseâ 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 (which was unrelated to work; I went on three weeks of medical leave following the assault). Even the sanitized summary CEA drafted, with his âpersonal feelingsâ removed, was deeply disturbing to read. It was also multiple pages. I understand it was not the âfocusâ of the document, but it is much more than one line that states âFrances was rapedâ. To my understanding, the document itself is just extremely long and discusses multiple employees and community members at length. I cannot understand how that did not immediately result in me being notified and the matter being referred to legal for investigation.
[Edit: adding the following paragraph] Youâve also said it was unfortunate I had to be proactive. Iâd like to point out that based on CEAâs formal processes, I would never have had the chance to report. I would never have known about the document. I only knew about it because one of the recipients went against leadership and informed me. You and the other recipients were the only people that could have done anything, and it is very likely to me that if she had not notified me about this document, it would still be in circulation today without my knowledge. On a human level, did any of you feel even a little worried after reading it? Or concerned/âempathetic? Did anyone raise a flag? Anyone?
On the change in outcomes:
Why did the investigation outcomes change so drastically after the appeal? At first, Riley remained with the organisation, could continue working out of CEAâs Oxford office, and could attend all events, and we were given walking paths and designated meal times. After the appeal, Iâm told that CEA âinitiated a processâ which led to his resignation, which I am interpreting as him being pushed out of the organisation. What substantively changed? To my knowledge, only two significant things differed: my stated intention to write publicly. Second, I had begun discussing the situation with a male, more senior, and respected member of the community who reached out to you directly to express deep concern. I donât know of any other changes, though Iâd like to if any exist. To my understanding, I will not be able to get clarity here.
Hey Zach, thanks for the response.
I know you are unlikely to be able to reply to this with anything meaningfully helpful, and this might be frustrating for you, but I just wanted to flag some things that from the outside seem at minimum incongruous.
Iâve typed this quickly and without visibility into all of the considerations and information you have, so apologies in advance if this is more uncharitable than youâd like. (emphasis in quotes added)
Sorry but presumably:
CEAâs obligation as an employer to evaluate complaints seriously also applies to Frances?
CEAâs obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Francesâ experiences in the doc?
an employee raising concerns about something doesnât shield them from all misconduct or harassment during the process of raising the concern?
What about the chilling effect of staff not feeling comfortable raising HR concerns, or even working in your organisation because empirically CEA donât seem to take harassment /â sexual harassment sufficiently seriously? Does the idea that multiple managers, HR, CEO, and COO of an organisation can allow a sexualised description of an employeeâs rape (etc) to be spread in the organisation without their consent, disregard an offer from the community health team to step in, and take ~no actions for 9 months not seem like it might have some kind of a chilling effect (or more)? I recognise that itâs important for HR concerns to be evaluated seriously but it feels like this standard wasnât applied in any meaningful way to Frances?
I hope you appreciate that itâs difficult to take this statement seriously; it really doesnât seem like the issue here is that CEA was following a standard HR process, both during the 9 months, as well as after the complaint.
What standard HR processes include âdesignated walking pathsâ and âassigned meal timesâ as appropriate responses? Alternatively, it seems like CEAâs âstandard HR processâ does not capture the fact that the kind of content circulated might very obviously be considered a separate HR issue? (I recognise you explicitly name some of these failings afterwards and I donât want to discount that, I just separately donât really think itâs very convincing that HR was âtoo focussed on following a standard processâ is a good excuse /â representation of what happened, and wanted to call that out.[1]
Fair enough! Sorry if Iâm reading too much into what might just be ~boilerplate. But acknowledging just the start time of the investigation makes it sound like you agree that this investigation should have been done, and once Frances advocated for this you took this seriously[2] (perhaps bar some âcommunication issuesâ that you acknowlege).
But if:
CEAâs own legal team decided this was harassment
you later acknowledge[3] that creating a culture that prevents/âaddresses sexual harassment included staffing changes such as removing Riley, etc;
Then why did CEA propose things like âdesignated walking pathsâ and âassigned meal timesâ the first time round, instead of just taking action at that stage? This doesnât seem like itâs just an issue of âCEA wasnât proactive about initiating this investigationâ, but also one where it didnât take the investigation or HR processes for Frances appropriately seriously! Also, this does not appear to just an issue of Riley, or of HR here. This document allegedly crossed multiple managers, as well as your, and the COOâs desk! Should readers be concluding that somehow none of the people involved considered taking further action? Or that they did take more actions and it didnât go anywhere? Or something else?
To be more explicit, right now it doesnât seem like thereâs any public information I can draw on to rule out something like âCEA took actions that appear consistent with them being motivated more by protecting themselves from legal and reputational risk, rather than because they are primarily interested in the wellbeing of their employeesâ.[4]
Given the seriousness of the situation I hope you understand me holding you to the public standard rather than base this off any positive personal interactions I may have had with you and any other CEA staff!
Part of the issue here is that even the groundwork that has already been laid did not help in this case right? Whatâs the reason the EA community, or prospective employees, should trust that things are different this time around?
(written in personal capacity)
Perhaps Iâd be more convinced by something like âexisting processes were grossly inadequate +/â- not applied consistentlyâ, for example
âWe have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously...â
âIn particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. Weâre laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way).â
See also the extent to which the effort CEA put into it changed once Frances informed the board that she was considering going public
I received this in my DMs and am sharing anonymously on their behalf:
The sharing of the document with people who probably shouldnât have seen it seems to have primarily been done by Riley in the original narrative (which is inappropriate, to be clear). The original post says that the people CEAâs HR shared it with was the COO and legal team. That seems appropriate to have done including in cases where CEA handled this well, as they would be the people evaluating if harassment occured and how to respond.
It sounds like a lot of really bad things happened in this case, and it may have been handled really poorly, but I donât think from the narrative that has been presented so far there is strong evidence it was shared inappropriately by anyone except Riley (though of course if the description of the contents is accurate, Riley sharing it is a form of harassment).
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
âIf the description is accurate.â The document is unequivocally harassment, as determined by two independent investigators. This is not disputable.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least thereâs no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/âits author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Yeah so I think they still have strong HR confidentiality obligations regardless of which staff Riley personally shares the document with, but I think at that point it is no longer strictly a âconfidential HR complaintâ and calling it such is an obfuscation on CEAâs part. Rileyâs conduct also immediately triggers obligations to me under both GDPR and the Worker Protection Act. So I think it basically separates into two distinct issues: Rileyâs complaint, whatever it was, and then his conduct within the document itself towards me (harassment). I think CEA should basically have treated these as almost independent events, even though they exist within one document.
If Riley had truly only shared it with HR, I think thatâs probably still bad but itâs also completely manageable. The flow could be something like: one person, HR, receives document â identifies potential harassment and GDPR violation â sends back something like, âdo not share this document further, I intend to quarantine it. Please rewrite your document to exclude any personal information about other employees. We will now need to treat this as two separate issues. First, the complaint youâre disclosing, which is your right to do and which we take seriously. Second, the additional conduct in the document, as it pertains to other employees, which we will need to address separately as it does not constitute a complaint.â
At the point itâs shared outside HR, the whole thing changes and I felt like I couldnât seem to get that message across internally, even though it feels so obvious to me. Not to mention that the CEO is, well, the CEO. Everyone is in their direct reporting line. I was at the same reporting level to the CEO as Riley, and he had now read explicit sexual content about me without my consent or knowledge. That just seems so obviously indefensible and bad that I sometimes feel like Iâm losing it.
Youâre not losing it: it is obviously indefensible. I think youâve provided more than enough information to make this clear, and anybody who doesnât get it at this point is probably not worth your time engaging with.
You can ask the following question to any chatbot and you will get the same answer:
I tested this on Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, and every single one urged me to separate the complaint from the sexual content and redact the sensitive information. And this is a much tamer situation than the one that actually happened!
They could have literally just asked a chatbot what to do, and it would have done a better job than their professional HR department.
One thing it might be useful for people to look at here when reflecting on the causes of the failure was how much experience the HR team had of working outside of EA organizations. If the answer is âvery littleâ then maybe bringing in more experienced non-EA pros would help, but if the answer is âa decent amountâ itâs less likely that will prevent future errors on its own.
To be clear, your organisation also had obligations not to spread around documents describing an employees experience of rape. A quick clauding points to GDPR protections against sharing âdata concerning a natural personâs sex lifeâ . Iâm not a lawyer but it seems like HR had a clear obligation to redact those parts of the complaint before sending it to the COO and other people, which didnât happen. And to state the obvious, concerns of a âchilling effectâ were unwarranted here: a standard of âyou can complain about your colleague as long as you donât sexual harrass someoneâ is pretty understandable to everyone.
Iâm glad that you have gained understanding about the serious mistakes that your organisation made. I remain horrified that it took so long for you to reach this understanding.
Can you check your claude link? this is what it links to for me:
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââXxXnPoGQ2eKsQx3FE/ââdata%20concerning%20a%20natural%20person%E2%80%99s%20sex%20life
I want to raise a concern about the bigger picture that feels important here, which Iâm sharing cautiously because I donât know all the details.
From the public account, it appears that Rileyâs document was circulated among multiple members of leadership and discussed internally for months before Frances was even aware of it, so by the time she entered the process, leadership had already been exposed to (and potentially biased toward) one narrative in detail.
Even if everyone involved was acting in good faith, that kind of sequencing can create a significant imbalance because the other person is unknowingly placed in a defensive position. I imagine I would feel overwhelmed, shocked, and powerless when I found out what had been taking place without my knowledge.
In addition, in situations where there has been prior romantic interest /â rejection, I worry there is a risk of retaliatory motivations. Iâm not asserting that this definitively occurred here, but given the publicly known facts, that there was romantic pursuit, rejection, and a complaint including (unempathetic and callous) speculation about mental health and a description of a rape, I think itâs reasonable for yellow flags to be raised.
I would want to understand:
âą Was the inclusion of sexualized and highly personal material treated as a red flag in itself?
âą Did anyone consider how the process creates a big information asymmetry that centers one partyâs perspective before the other has a chance to respond?
âą Were people aware that when prior interpersonal tensions exist (especially romantic and gendered ones), there is a risk of prematurely treating one party as the problem?
To me, neutrality is not the only concern. Holistic appraisal of the situation is probably even more important. I raise this publicly because I hope that discussion of these risk patterns can help prevent harmful events from playing out in the future.
I am responding completely in a personal capacity and not as a representative of CEA.
Others have touched on why this response feels unsatisfying, but on a meta level, Iâm not sure responding in this level of detail was the right call. The additional context doesnât really contradict Francesâs account and it mostly reframes things in ways that, intentionally or not, read as defensive. If CEA genuinely accepts that it made serious mistakes, I think the stronger move would have been a shorter, clearer apology without any explanatory scaffolding.
I also really hope Frances was informed that this response would be posted and, ideally, shown the specific contents beforehand. Based on her reply, that doesnât appear to be the case. Publishing a detailed public explanation of your side of someoneâs account of being sexually harassed at your organisation without any notification seems like a pretty significant misstep on its own.
Zach, with all due respect:
Itâs shocking you/âCEA didnât see a victim cancellation document for what it was.
EA has a documented cultural problem, from the TIME magazine article to what happened to Kathy Forth and beyond. Your organization is embedded in that culture and needs to set an example. If the substantive change is âhiring a new HR managerâ, it is not good enough.
I urge and implore you to seek expertise outside of EA and your organization that has experience in dealing with these issues, and to be transparent about their findings. If Leverage Research could do it, so can CEA.
The exceptionalism inherent in EA /â rat communities leads to actions that work out to corrupt police departments investigating themselves and it really needs to stop.
This seems to exemplify the problem I have with most EA organizations. They are often run by people who are young, with great talent, but no serious prior experience. I donât assume malevolence from Zach, and think the most probable explanation is that he (like many at EA orgs) didnât know the basics about what not to do while running a company. I donât say that to be mean. But anyone with experience would understand immediately that this constituted sexual harassment under US Law and violated the Worker Protection Act. I fear EAs are prone to do everything their own way, without thought of why existing norms and structures are there in the first place. This is one of the reasons other companies often promote by seniority. They have the experience and understanding needed to see the obvious. This is the sort of thing that would be so extremely obvious to someone with decades of experience. Do other companies have worse scandals? Yes. But I think the number of scandals in EA orgs that surround ânot seeing or doing the obvious thingâ is much higher than average.
Experience has nothing to do with it. I have zero CEO or HR experience and itâs extremely obvious to me too. EA might have a higher rate of ânot seeing or doing the obvious thingâ because there is usually a blind spot in assessing the âEââthat is âEffectivenessâ of the altruism. One blind spot doesnât exist alone...
This reply, given the context, is unbelievable. You, and the entire CEA leadership, should resign. There should not be a place for what your organization did in the 21st century; there are no words to describe how much it is a failure of everything CEA was supposed to stand for that it is CEA where it happened, and that this is your response.
This is the correct response to the whole situation. And of course in the world we live in, it gets downvoted.