The Washington Post - 03.03.2020

C2 eZ su THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAy, MARCH 3 , 2020

that would negatively impact the employee or the network. It also bars office romances. At one point, PBS attorney Grace Speights displayed a photo of Smiley and photos of seven women. Six accused him of harassment. One did not but said she and Smiley dated while work- ing together. “Mr. Smiley engaged in a pattern of conduct of having sex with subordinates, referencing oral sex, propositioning employees for sex while on trips and making harassing phone calls,” she told the jury. “He believed that because he was paying them, paying their benefits that it somehow justified this conduct. And that is unacceptable.” In one of the videos played earlier in the trial, a producer named Stephanie, who is white, said Smiley asked her in the presence of another employee whether she had ever had sex with a black man. Another woman, Erica, testified that while on a business trip in Atlanta, she was in a restau- rant with co-workers when Smi- ley asked her “Why are you playing so hard to get?” and asked her to meet him in his hotel room later. “I was taken aback. I had given him no indication that was ever a desire of mine,” the woman said, at times her voice cracking with emotion. Smiley said Erica was fired because she was bad at her job and denied propositioning her. As the videos were played, Smiley’s mother, Joyce, with her

names. One, named Tracy, said she worked as a producer and, at one point, dated Smiley. She testified Smiley bragged about how one of the women performed oral sex on him at work. “That’s a lie from hell,” Smiley testified. “That’s a baseless at- tack.” Tracy testified that while the two were at Smiley’s Los A ngeles-area home, Smiley asked her for oral sex. She declined and left. She said as she was driving home, Smiley telephoned her and told her to call him when she arrived at her home. She refused. Smiley, she said, then reminded her that he was her boss and that she had refused a request from her supervisor. A day or so later, Tracy said, she was fired. But on the witness stand, one of Smiley’s managers said that the woman was terminated for excessive lateness and that she had been given numerous warn- ings. Paula Kerger, PBS president and chief executive, who attend- ed every day of the trial, testified that she was “proud” to have Smiley’s show on her network. “He’s a very talented man who brought a lot of interesting conversation to the show,” she said. Kerger testified that the allegations against Smiley initially came in an anonymous phone call placed just after PBS had canceled the show of Charlie Rose, another PBS talk-show host who was also accused of sexual harassment. It w as the height of the # MeTo o movement, when women across the nation were using social media to voice their stories and outrage regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault. B ut Smiley’s attorneys argued that although PBS conducted an internal investigation, the network terminated Smiley’s show without substantiating the allegations. At the center of the case is the morals clause that PBS has with on-air talent. It forbids employees from doing anything publicly

ty i nitiatives were discriminatory against white men, that there were more men in engineering because men were innately more talented.” T he dark humor in that line sharpens when read in con- cert with “Whistleblower,” in which Fowler describes supple- menting her rigorous graduate courses at Penn with hours of research on string theory and theoretical particle physics. The idea that hers was the intellectu- al horsepower Uber could do without, while predatory men needed to be protected at all costs, would be genuinely hilari- ous if the consequences weren’t so devastating. As Gamergate-style harassment flourishes, conspiracies metasta- size and algorithms push us all to the extremes, one can only imagine the alternate reality in which Fowler and her ilk were the ones hailed as geniuses and given all the money in this world to build a better one. Instead their days were (and are) monopolized by insani- ty-inducing activities, such as trying to figure out how to report HR to HR. Meanwhile, a nationwide “techlash” is underway. As the New York Times reports, a younger generation of engineers and innovators are sizing up what would be asked of them should they join these Silicon Valley stalwarts — complicity in the family-separation efforts of Immigrations and Customs En- forcement, say, or the steady erosion of democracy — and are opting out. Fowler is now a tech editor at the New York Times. Since leav- ing Uber in 2016, she hasn’t written a single line of code. [email protected]

Jessica M. Goldstein is a freelance writer based in Washington.

The Reliable Source

Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil have moved on to new assignments at The Post. A search is underway for a new Reliable Source columnist. The column will return.

BY MATTHEW GUERRIERI

If you asked me to imagine a
kind of quintessential American
opera-going experience of, say, 50
or 100 years ago, I might envision
something not unlike Washington
National Opera’s new production
of Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson
and Delilah,” which opened on
Sunday afternoon at the Kennedy
Center. The show wasn’t c omplete-
ly retro; both scenery and staging
had a modern, high-tech sheen.
But the scaffolding was traditional:
big singing, broad acting, basic
staging, taking the art form as a
vessel for vocal glory and musical
glamour. On that wavelength,
there was a good time to be had.
The story of the siren Delilah
seducing the Hebrew hero Samson
into giving up the secret of his
strength — his hair — is Sunday-
school familiar. Ferdinand Le-
maire’s libretto comprises both
play-by-play and color commen-
ta ry; the opera could almost work as
an oratorio. (In places, the charac-
ters tell you what’s going to happen,
they tell you what’s happening, and
then they tell you what happened.)
But conductor John Fiore, especial-
ly in the show’s second half, found a
compensatory musical momen-
tum, balancing Saint-Saëns’s lush-
ness with dashes of rhythmic point.
The headline draw was Ameri-
can mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges,
as Delilah, making her WNO de-
but. Her instrument and talent
were striking. Her singing showed
more power than d elicacy: her l ow
notes were great, elemental
things, seeming to roll through t he
auditorium, her high range all
sharply milled gunmetal. As Sam-
son, Roberto Aronica’s b right, bur-
ly tenor matched h er peal for peal,
but he shifted into a more intro-
spective gear for Samson’s post-
haircut lament (“Vois ma misère,
hélas”) t o beguiling effect.
Baritone Noel Bouley made the
Philistine High Priest a smooth
spin doctor with rich, easy vol-
ume; bass-baritone To mas To mas-
son grabbed onto the role of the
nefarious Abimélech with aggres-
sive relish. In smaller roles, Peter
Volpe, Matthew Pearce, Samuel J.
Weiser and Joshua Blue — the last
three from the WNO’s Young Art-

oPerA reVIew

‘Samson and Delilah’

has a lot of strengths

ist Program — proved a strong bench. The chorus, directed by Steven G athman, started off fuzzy, but s oon came i nto f ocus, with the men providing some especially clear and clarion p assages. The acting ranged from silent- movie simple to silent-movie showy. Bridges was a zealous vamp from the get-go; To masson a prowling, barefaced m alefactor; Bouley a rest- less shark, gliding b etween wily pos- es. (Michael Scott and Timm Bur- row’s costumes were built for such flamboyance: regal, riotous combi- nations of gilt and color fashioned into flowing robes designed to be twirled like a villain’s mustache.) Aronica went to the other extreme, rotating through a small repertoire of stock gestures, letting his vocal presence do the bulk of the work. Director Peter Kazaras made ro om for both styles, embracing the opera’s tell-more-than-show dramaturgy, moving from tableau to tableau. One could wish for a stronger sense of physical purpose with less meandering, but most of the scenes arrived at balanced pic- tures. As i n WNO’s “Don Giovanni,” playing in repertory with this show, Erhard Rom’s geometric, neutral- ground sets and scrims were cloaked and transformed by S. Katy Tucker’s video projections, show- ing more Te chnicolor flair and spe- cial effects than the restrained pal- ette used in the Mozart. The climactic b acchanal was an old-school operatic-cinematic an- thology: Eric Sean Fogel’s chore- ography p ractically putting incan- descent, marquee-lit quotation marks around the idea of “pagan” dancing; Bridges and Bouley, re- splendently attired, repeatedly throwing their arms wide i n theat- rical triumph; Robert Wierzel’s lighting dramatically isolating Samson in a bold white iris. And when all the elements lined up, one could spot opera’s omnivo- rous glory: high and low, refined and gaudy, grand and goofy, in shameless complementarity. [email protected]

Washington national opera’s “samson and delilah,” about three hours including intermission, will be performed intermittently through march 21 at the Kennedy center.

scott sucHmAn/Kennedy center

J ’Nai Bridges as Delilah in WNO’s “Samson and Delilah.”

different existential dilemma about what one can and should sustain. Wiener wrestled with whether “ to bring up the running list of casual hostilities toward women” she felt it necessary to document at the thriving start- up where she worked. “Com- pared to other women I’d met, I had i t good. But t he bar w as so, s o low.” As for Fowler, her surreal, harrowing experiences at Uber only intensified. She could not escape her sexist bosses; the worst offenders intentionally gave women poor performance reviews to prevent them from transferring. “The power dynam- ics within the company seemed sociopathic,” Fowler writes. “Whenever something bad happened — like sexual harassment, verbal abuse, or another form of bullying — instead of the prob- lem being addressed and fixed, it was covered up. Left to seethe and rot, the toxic behavior slowly infected the rest of the company. It was like a disease.” Fowler believed it would up- end her life to speak publicly about Uber. She was right. She writes that she was stalked by private investigators, who also hounded her friends and family. “Several people warned me that my life was in danger. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they have you killed,’ one famous per- son in the tech industry said.” The only “morbid thought” that gave Fowler comfort was know- ing that, should she be mur- dered, “everyone would know exactly who was responsible.” One recurring motif in “Uncan-

There were popular strategies for managing sexism at work, Wiener learned. Some women “educate and course-correct.” Ot hers “scare and shame their colleagues for unabashed sexism.” These coping mechanisms, such as they are, feel as flimsy and pathetic as keys jammed between clammy fingers. Fowler was raised in rural Arizona in extreme poverty; at times her family went without electricity or running water. Home-schooled by religious parents, she got into tech only after her pursuits of her first two academic passions — p hysics and philosophy — were thwarted by institutional failures that still seem to bewilder her. As she faced ever-escalating gendered harassment in Silicon Valley, she writes, “the thought that such treatment might follow me, no matter how high up the socioeco- nomic ladder I climbed, abso- lutely terrified me.” Wiener, meanwhile, found herself “privileged and down- wardly mobile” after graduating from college debt-free and land- ing a job in publishing in New York, where she earned a pit- tance only tenable because her “generous, forgiving parents” co uld subsidize her salary. She high-tailed it to San Francisco with the aspirational-for-a-mil- lennial goal of affording her own health insurance; she had only one year left o n her parents’ plan. Assessing her New York life, she writes: “The situation was not sustainable. I was not sustainable.” But Silicon Valley brought a

experience. “Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace — but they were everywhere,” Wiener writes. “Like wallpaper, like air.” Fowler wound up at Uber because she was fleeing her “open- ly, unabashedly sexist” boss at PubNub, and she’d started work- ing at PubNub because before that, at Plaid, she was pulling 14-hour days and getting paid $50,000 less than her male co- workers. Before taking a job interview with Uber, Fowler “spent a lot of time searching online for things like ‘Uber sexual harassment,’ ‘Uber discrimina- tion,’ and ‘Uber work culture,’ determined to avoid a repeat of my past experiences.” But nothing bad came up. She later le arned why: Uber employees were silenced by forced arbitra- tion clauses. On her first day, she was propositioned by her boss. With the practiced ease of a dancer who knows the choreog- raphy in her bones, Fowler enact- ed a routine that “was almost second nature to me at this point

... take a screenshot, email it to
myself, share it with someone
else for safekeeping, back it up to
several cloud services, print off a
hard copy, repeat.”
Wiener was also familiar with
this routine. “Women kept per-
sonal incident logs,” she writes.
“They kept spreadsheets. They
kept tabs.” They all had stories,
from “the woman who had been
slipped GHB by a friend of her
CEO” to the woman who was
“raped by a ‘10X’ engineer, then
pushed out of the company after
reporting to HR.”

BY JESSICA M. GOLDSTEIN

I don’t remember when I
le arned that you’re supposed to
hold your keys between your
knuckles when you walk to your
car at night. Every adult woman
I’ve met knows this. It doesn’t
matter where you’re from, who
your parents are, where you went
to school. We all just osmotically
absorb the awareness that vigi-
lance is compulsory and vulnera-
bility is inevitable. I don’t know
what men do when they’re not
training to be parking-lot Wol-
verines. Maybe they just relax?
Sounds like a dream.
Susan Fowler famously re-
signed from Uber after the “very,
very strange year” s he document-
ed in a viral blog post detailing
rampant sexual harassment,
abuse and general lawlessness at
the ride-hail behemoth. Her
memoir, “Whistleblower,” is a
methodical and earnest retelling
of one woman’s effort to go to
school and do her job in environ-
ments that were actively hostile
to her existence and well-being.
“Whistleblower” comes out
ju st a month after Anna Wiener’s
memoir, “Uncanny Valley.” Wie-
ner, now a New Yorker contribu-
tor, worked at a big data start-up
in San Francisco during the tech-
frenzied 2010s. Her book is wry,
astute, delicious and occasional-
ly brutal. Wiener takes readers
through her realization that s he’s
had a small part in normalizing
the invasive surveillance of con-
sumers that will soon become
commonplace. Thrumming
through Wiener’s narrative is the
theme that dominated Fowler’s

Women describe the lowest points in Silicon Valley

BooK world ny Valley” is

that people in the start-up scene remind Wiener of children. Commut- ers to the cam- puses of search engine and social media ti- tans wear ID badges “clipped to their belt loops or draped on top of their jackets, like children trying not to get lost in a mall.” At the weekly all- hands meeting, staffers con- verge, “flank- ing the CEO in a semicircle like children at a progressive kindergarten.” An account manager whis- pers “as though we were collud- ing, as though we were five years old.” When point- ing this out, her tone is some- times one of maternal warmth, even wonder. Other times, she seems dumbstruck that the people building our collective future — a boundaryless dystopia where civil- ians have no privacy while tech giants sway elections, avert ac- countability and skip out on paying taxes — are nothing more than enterprising, self-aggrandizing boys. All the women in tech, Wiener writes, had been told by these male power players “ that diversi-

wHIstle- Blower My Journey to silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by susan Fowler Viking. 272 pp. $28

UnCAnny VAlley A Memoir by Anna Wiener mcd. 279 pp. $27

Bible in hand, walked out of the courtroom and sat in the hallway. Another woman said she had been paid $175 to do five-minute spots about health issues on Smi- ley’s radio show between 2008 and 2009. Once, when Smiley was visiting Chicago, where she lived, she met him at his hotel room. The woman said Smiley insisted they have sex and she refused. “I felt I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t,” she said. She never heard from Smiley again and her radio segment was later canceled. Smiley testified that to save money, h is show canceled about a half-dozen or so radio segments, and the health spot was among them. In her deposition, a producer named Holly described the day when she booked then-Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for Smiley’s show. She testified she got “dressed up” because Kerry was a major guest. Holly testified that Smiley commented on her legs in front of other co-workers and read a joke off his phone about oral sex. Smiley said he did not “recall” telling her a joke about oral sex. He admitted “teasing” Holly about her skirt, but said several co-workers had commented on her appearance. Another woman also named Tracy, who was employed as a producer in 2013, testified that Smiley repeatedly “pressured her” into having a relationship. She said Smiley threatened to “destroy” her career if she re- buffed him. S miley insisted that he and the woman had been in a relationship and that he was “hurt” and “angry” by her allegations. “I never threatened to destroy any- one. That’s not my purview,” he said. Smiley said the woman was angry because she wanted an equity share in his company and he refused. Smiley’s attorney, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., argued none of the women presented any witnesses, emails or text messages to sup- port their allegations. Four of the women testified about Smiley’s temper, saying he would yell, curse and berate employees. “ Do not let them use the tired, old racist stereotype of the angry black man. We’re better than that,” Sullivan said. One of the few men who testified on behalf of Smiley said Smiley also yelled at him because “I had messed up and I deserved it. He was the boss.” [email protected]

BY KEITH L. ALEXANDER

One by one, the voices of six female employees of former PBS talk show host Ta vis Smiley sounded in a D.C. courtroom, each woman describing incidents in which they claim Smiley re- quested sex or told a lewd joke while at work. Some of the women said that they felt pressured to comply with those requests and that they faced retaliation — even losing their jobs — if they didn’t. Others described comments or jokes by Smiley that they said made them uncomfortable in the workplace. During three weeks of trial, Smiley listened to the women’s accounts, played in court by video deposition. When he took the witness stand he admitted he’d had intimate relationships with two of the women. But he said several of the accounts were false and insisted he never acted with retribution and never intended to offend. “I’m a black man struggling to make it in America. I have laughed at all of this so-called power. I struggled to raise money to keep my show on the air. I never had such power,” Smiley, 55, testified. “I have influence, but I don’t have power.” The accusations — and Smi- ley’s responses — were detailed as Smiley and PBS squared o ff i n court, with each side arguing that the other was in breach of contract when the network stopped airing his show in 20 17 following t he sexual harassment allegations. On Monday, attorneys for PBS and Smiley gave their closing arguments before the jury began deliberations. For 14 years, PBS distributed Smiley’s late-night talk show to 238 PBS stations nationwide, about 72 percent of its network. Smiley, who claims the network terminated his contract without proof of the allegations, is suing PBS f or nearly $1 million. The network is countersuing for about $1.7 million that the network says Smiley owes in money it had provided for a season that never aired. The case is being heard in D.C. Superior Court because Smiley’s company, TS Media, while based in Los Angeles, is incorporated in the District. During the trial, Smiley said that he did date some co-workers and that his company did not have a policy forbidding them. He said because he worked long hours, he was unable to meet women outside of work. But Smiley bristled at many of the allegations and repeatedly denied he used his role as found- er and CEO of his media company to pressure the women into sex. He said he never threatened the jobs of women who rebuked him. And he said the women who complained saw the case as “an opportunity for revenge” after a failed relationship or losing their jobs for a legitimate reason. Most of the women were iden- tified in court only by their first

In court, Smiley responds to six employees’ accounts

2016 pHoto by rIcH Fury/InVIsIon/AssocIAted press A PBS lawyer said former TV host Tavis Smiley, seen in 2016, “engaged in a pattern of conduct of having sex with subordinates.”

“I was taken aback.

I had given him no

indication that was

e ver a desire of mine.” erica, one of tavis smiley’s former employees, who said he asked her t o meet him in his hotel room on a business trip

The Washington Post - 03.03.2020

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