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Bloomberg accused of running media empire with toxic work culture
Michael Bloomberg has been repeatedly accused of presiding over a toxic, predatory environment in dozens of lawsuits filed by female staff over the past two decades, a new report reveals.
Bloomberg LP, the business-news-focused media company founded and owned by the 77-year-old multi-billionaire has been hit with nearly 40 discrimination and harassment suits from 64 employees that have regained currency since Bloomberg announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A common theme in many of the suits is the allegation that Bloomberg, who is worth about $54 billion, created a “reckless playground” for male executives to “target young, female, naive employees” for sex, according to a Business Insider investigation of the claims.
The report, which comes less than a week after the wealthy philanthropist announced his White House bid, focuses on suits from two female employees who say they left the company after they were plied with alcohol and sexually assaulted by a senior male colleague.
At the time of both assaults, Bloomberg was the CEO.
The billionaire founder and former New York City Mayor was also accused of leering at female employees and making sexists comments, according to the report.
Bloomberg allegedly made sexually explicit comments to staff, including: “If you looked like that … I would do you in a second,” and, “I would like nothing more in life than to have Sharon Stone sit on my face,” according to court papers reviewed by Business Insider.
On Wednesday, a spokesman for Bloomberg LP said sexual harassment at the company was “prohibited and offenders face termination.”
“Bloomberg strongly supports a culture that treats all employees with dignity and respect, and enforces that culture through clear policies and practices,” he said.
“Our diversity and inclusion efforts — including training on preventing harassment and gender bias — are designed to foster a culture where thousands of people are proud to work every day.”
As of Wednesday, five lawsuits against the presidential candidate and his company were ongoing.
In a suit filed as recently as 2016, a female Bloomberg employee, identified only as Margaret Doe, accused her male boss of raping her twice, plying her with drugs and threatening to terminate her employment if she didn’t continue sleeping with him.
Doe said the company had a “rampant drug culture” and accused Nick Ferris, a former Bloomberg sales manager, of getting her addicted to powerful narcotics after she started working at the company in September 2012.
“We terminated Mr. Ferris in early November 2015, well before any complaints were made against him. We discovered inappropriate conduct through our own compliance tools, investigated it thoroughly and terminated his employment with us,” said Bloomberg LP Spokesman Ty Trippet.
In another suit exclusively reported by The Post last year, a female Bloomberg executive claimed she was forced out of the organization after she witnessed Doe being sexually harassed by Ferris.
As for the case also being filed against Bloomberg’s all-male editorial leaders as defendants, Bloomberg argued that the case should be dismissed against them, too, as it “fails plausibly to allege that any of the individual defendants participated in, or even knew about, the alleged discriminatory conduct.” Founder Michael Bloomberg is not named as an individual defendant.
A Bloomberg representative could not be reached for comment on the updated complaint.
Now, Sayeed and Ndugga are also represented by Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, a major plaintiff-side litigation firm in Washington that has worked on behalf of residents of Flint, Mich., in their lawsuits over water quality, in addition to the smaller Clancy Law Firm, which has brought other discrimination lawsuits against Bloomberg. The updated compliant includes new federal claims of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil rights Act. The initial complaint only claimed violation of state laws.
Beyond pay and promotion disparities, Ndugga claims discrimination went to the core of her work. When executives decided to give producers content by theme, male peers were asked which themes they preferred to cover, and Ndugga said she was not. Instead she was assigned the “scraps” that no one else took.
When she was again denied a raise in February, Ndugga pitched that she might move into a new role focused specifically on race and identity within her production team. She was allegedly rejected because she “already filled that role by being a Black woman on the team.” Meanwhile, the word “colored” was allegedly used in news scripts, according to the complaint.
In another instance, Ndugga asked a white male executive producer, David Meyers, why a video on global marathons included coverage of Uganda that depicted a white woman “holding seemingly impoverished Black Ugandan children.” Instead of discussing the issue, the producer allegedly yelled, threw his headphones in Ndugga’s direction and demanded that she go talk to him outside. She refused and the following day he emailed her, along with their boss Mindy Masucci, global content leader of Quicktake, saying she could report him to HR “if she felt so inclined,” while also accusing her of being “aggressive” and depicting her as an “angry Black woman,” according to the complaint.
This incident allegedly resulted in the executive producer boxing her out at work, not inviting her to staff meetings and cutting her off of emails, to the extent that her coworkers began forwarding them to her “so she would be aware of information needed for her job.”
Her complaints were allegedly ignored. But at the end of May, she was scheduled to conduct an on camera interview with a source to discuss the police killing of George Floyd, booking her guest and getting training. The interview was suddenly canceled and Ndugga was told “only ‘certain people’ were qualified to conduct live interviews,” despite men with similar levels of experience being allowed to do so, according to the complaint.
Overall, Ndugga claims Bloomberg’s all white and male editorial management committee have “refused repeatedly” this year to cover topics of race, “saying they didn’t want to “become the race channel.” She tried to bring up the issue of diversifying coverage on a call with editor in chief John Micklethwait and was again ignored. And yet, Ndugga claims that she’s been asked “many times” to “recount her own trauma, as a Black female to ‘help guide the team,’ only to be trivialized and mislabeled.”
Although Ndugga is currently employed by Bloomberg, by joining Sayeed’s lawsuit, she is seeking a declaratory judgment that Bloomberg has violated Title VII, engaged in discriminatory practices, and for damages of no less than $5 million. The women are still seeking class action status, to include similarly situated past and current Bloomberg employees.