B4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020warned young women to avoid
Mr. Fuoco at regular Guild-
hosted happy hours. And more
reporting revealed darker se-
crets: Two women who were
taught by Mr. Fuoco in college
journalism classes said he had
pressured them into sexual rela-
tionships. One became pregnant
with his child, according to court
records.
He was so prolific in his har-
assment, that woman told me, he
was like Pittsburgh’s Harvey
Weinstein.
The NewsGuild was hardly the
only institution that looked the
other way. The Post-Gazette
management received at least
two complaints about Mr. Fuoco’s
conduct over two decades. The
newspaper’s executives knew of
his sexual relationship with at
least one former college student
and gave him a wrist-slap of a
week’s suspension — part of
what many women say was a
climate in the newsroom in
which they had no real support
or recourse. “I felt like both the
management and the union
lacked respect for women,” said a
former Post-Gazette reporter,
Annie Siebert.
But the way the NewsGuild
handled the accusations is, in
part, the story of a new genera-
tion of activist-minded labor
leaders struggling to take hold of
the movement’s sprawling orga-
nization, and grappling with a
legacy inside the labor move-
ment that contains the same
troubling dynamics around race
and gender as other institutions
of American life.
Pittsburgh is a union town, and
the characters and history that
gave it its identity still play an
outsize role here. The journalists’
Guild was long a junior partner
to the other big unions — mai-
lers, Teamsters, platemakers,
paperhandlers, pressmen, ma-
chinists and others — who manu-
factured and distributed as many
as 530,000 Sunday copies of The
Post-Gazette in the 1990s.
Now, the paper is printed only
three days a week, and Sunday
circulation barely tops 100,000.
Mr. Fuoco has led Guild mem-
bers in confrontational battles
with management, which has
moved to shrink health care
benefits and other spending.
And yet The Post-Gazette
remains one of the best local
newspapers left in America. The
staff, which has gone 14 years
without a raise, still competes for
Pulitzers even as members
grudgingly produce society
stories about the lavish Kentucky
Derby party hosted by John
Robinson Block, one of the eccen-
tric twins who inherited and still
run the paper.
The accusations about Mr.
Fuoco came to Mr. Schleuss from
an independent labor journalist
and activist who lives in Pitts-
burgh, Mike Elk. After Mr. Elk
wrote about sexual harassment
in another union in 2019, a re-
porter for The Washington Post,
Moriah Balingit, contacted him
with a tip about her own bad
experience at The Post-Gazette.
Even though she didn’t give him
her permission to tell her story
to the union, he decided he had
an obligation to do so. He
emailed Mr. Schleuss in Decem-
ber 2019, requesting “that the
Guild open its own investigation
into this.” He met with Mr.
Schleuss in January to press the
matter and shared Ms. Balingit’s
name with him.
The union didn’t try to contact
her. “It did not feel appropriate
for me to approach” Ms. Balingit
then “because of the sensitive
and nonspecific nature” of the
tip, Mr. Schleuss wrote to Pitts-
burgh union leaders on Saturday.
Mr. Elk then began a series of
increasingly angry email ex-
changes with the union president
demanding that the union look
into it, a campaign that lasted
several months. A union official
finally spoke to Ms. Balingit in
August, but she said she wasn’t
interested in lodging a complaint
in the union’s formal disciplinary
process, according to both her
and Mr. Schleuss.
The union did not take the
inquiry any further.
But disturbing secrets lay just
below the surface. The news
business in Pittsburgh is a small
world, full of people who have
worked together for decades. Mr.
Fuoco had led the union since
2010 with a fierce determination
and outsize personality. He had a
reputation for telling great
stories and for passionately
defending reporters facing disci-
pline for anything from showing
up late for work to plagiarizing
from Wikipedia — and for har-
assing young female interns.
Post-Gazette veterans called
his behavior an open secret,
dating back at least to the 1990s.One woman, who asked not to be
identified, said she complained
both to the union and to the
company’s head of human re-
sources about both hostile and
sexual emails from Mr. Fuoco in
January 2000, when he objected
to her doing a story on his police
beat. (The newspaper said it had
no record of the complaint.) “All
the women knew to keep an eye
out for him,” Annie Siebert, who
worked at The Post-Gazette until
2013 and was active with the
union, told me in a phone inter-
view last week.
Other women I interviewed
offered more specific accusa-
tions. Ms. Balingit described
how, as a 22-year-old reporter at
a Guild party in 2008, she
stepped outside for a smoke, and
Mr. Fuoco tried to kiss her. A
former staff photographer, Re-
becca Droke, said he kissed her,unexpectedly and inappropri-
ately, while they were seated
next to each other at a gathering
after an awards banquet in Har-
risburg in 2013.
“There needs to be a real
reckoning and real accountability
for what happened there,” said
Ms. Droke, who worked at the
paper from 2006 to 2019, includ-
ing as an assistant managing
editor.
Ms. Balingit, who worked at
The Post-Gazette from 2008 to
2014 said she realized how hos-
tile the environment had been
only after she left to work at The
Washington Post, and things
were different.
“I remarked to a friend that I’d
been working there for 18
months and hadn’t been har-
assed a single time,” she said. “It
was striking to me.”
Mr. Fuoco’s stature in the city
extended well beyond the news-
room, as did his reported misbe-
havior. He taught journalism
classes at Point Park University
(where the Guild also represents
faculty) and the University of
Pittsburgh. Diana Kelly, who was
a 22-year-old senior in his class
back in 2002, had transferred
home to Pitt because she was
struggling with depression. She
told me that Mr. Fuoco had en-
couraged her, telling her she was
a talented writer with a big fu-
ture, and invited her out for a
drink after the semester ended.
“It became very clear that it
wasn’t about him talking to me
about my future career opportu-
nities,” she recalled. Soon, she
felt trapped in a sexual relation-
ship with him that continued
until 2006, emails she shared
with The Times and a formercollege friend confirmed.
“As a teacher now, it just horri-
fies me,” Ms. Kelly told me in an
interview last week.
Ms. Kelly knew she wasn’t the
only student to have had that
experience. Mr. Fuoco was, si-
multaneously, trying to distance
himself from another young
woman, whom he had met when
he came to lecture before a jour-
nalism class at Point Park Uni-
versity in 2002. Later that year,
when she was 22 and still a stu-
dent, as well as a stringer for
The Post-Gazette, she became
pregnant and had Mr. Fuoco’s
child, an account confirmed in
part by court documents in their
child support case.
The former Point Park student
complained to the Post-Gazette
in 2011, describing their relation-
ship and claiming that Mr. Fuoco
had threatened her, according to
emails she shared with me. The
newspaper’s vice president of
human resources, Stephen B.
Spolar, responded in another
email, saying that based on
reading her email and talking to
Mr. Fuoco, “I have concluded
that your argument is a personal
one,” and he instructed her not to
contact Mr. Fuoco “during work
hours.” The Post-Gazette sus-
pended Mr. Fuoco, for one week,
for using company time and
resources such as his company
email account on the personal
matter, a current and a former
Post-Gazette executive said.
Both said they would only dis-
cuss it only on the condition of
anonymity because it is a person-
nel issue.
Mr. Fuoco responded to the
suspension by blaming the for-
mer student for the salary he
lost. “I want my money and I
want it before I leave work to-
day,” he wrote to her on April 16
in an email she shared with me.
The company said in a state-
ment this week that it believed
that it had “appropriately ad-
dressed the single complaint.”
Some inside the newsroom
were not eager to cross Mr.
Fuoco. They feared his power,
and for their reputations, in a
town that effectively has just one
major newspaper left. Others
worried about undermining their
cause during a bitter contract
fight with the Block Communica-
tions Group, which owns the
newspapers and is trying to
impose a tough new contract on
employees.
Mr. Elk, an abrasive gadfly
whose website covers corruption
inside unions, did not have those
restraints. He became almost
fixated on the issue, sending Mr.
Schleuss increasingly personal
emails, calling his inaction on Mr.
Fuoco “pathetic.”
On September 22, Mr. Elk
published anonymous accusa-
tions on his independent labor-
focused website, Payday Report.
“Fuoco, president of the Pitts-
burgh NewsGuild since 2010, hasbeen accused of using union
happy hours to prey upon, make
unwanted sexual advances, and
grope women who were some-
times 30 to 40 years younger
than him,’’ the website reported.
Three days later, Mr. Schleuss
was in town to march with Post-
Gazette members demanding a
new contract. He also met pri-
vately with Mr. Fuoco, telling
him “everything was fine be-
cause everyone knows that Elk is
insane and has a vendetta
against the Guild,” Mr. Fuoco told
me in an email. (Mr. Elk de-
scribes himself a “dissident
member of the Guild” and said
he identifies as autistic.) Mr.
Schleuss said he didn’t recall thedetails of that conversation.
But as he was driving back to
Washington that night, Mr.
Schleuss received a call from the
former Point Park student, who
had gotten his number from Mr.
Elk. “I was worried that because
of his reporting style, people
weren’t believing the substance
of Elk’s reporting,” she told me.
“I knew it to be true because I
experienced it.” She said she was
impressed by the union leader’s
“zero-tolerance attitude” on their
call. Mr. Schleuss then moved
swiftly, briefed the Pittsburgh
union leadership, and Mr. Fuoco
agreed to step down that
evening. He also resigned from
the newspaper.
Mr. Schleuss said he thought
he and his union had handled the
accusations appropriately
throughout, despite almost a
year of inaction. “The moment
that I got concrete evidence that
was credible and actionable, I
acted,” he said.
Mr. Fuoco said in an email that
the accusations of sexual miscon-
duct are “false,” and he said the
union had not at any point con-
ducted a real inquiry.
“If there ever was an investi-
gation over the past two months
I have no knowledge of it be-
cause NO ONE ever contacted
me,” he said in an email.
Last week, Mr. Schleuss
sounded a bit like the manage-
ment executives the union has
chastised in recent years, prom-
ising new training to fight sexual
harassment and other forms of
bigotry and to enforce an envi-
ronment of mutual respect.
(I was on the management
side of an organizing drive last
year and wrote about that and
the union revival in May.)
But it is clear that the searing
cultural and generational issues
tearing at newsrooms cannot be
easily tamed within the union.
Mr. Fuoco’s resignation set off
a new election at The Post-Ga-
zette, and last month members
watched election committee
members count ballots over
Zoom. The results, when they
arrived, shocked Guild leaders.
Members had, by a vote of 55 to
52, chosen a 28-year-old breaking
news reporter, Lacretia Wimbley,
over a member of the paper’s old
guard as their new president. A
young Black woman would lead
the union.
It was a rejection of, among
other things, Mr. Fuoco’s theatri-
cal preparations for a strike that
had divided the newsroom and
raised concerns with top national
union officials.
But a week later, in a minia-
ture echo of Rudy Giuliani’s
Pennsylvania misadventures,
Post-Gazette reporters received
an email: Some mail-in ballots
had not come with return ad-
dresses, and were therefore, well,
invalid. The election was open to
challenge if the losing candidate
chose to. The acting president of
the Pittsburgh guild, Ed Blazina,
announced that the election
would be rerun, prompting a
furious response from the appar-
ent winner and her supporters.
“On the same day the Guild
sends out a statement demand-
ing more diversity in the news-
room, it removes an African-
American woman as its presi-
dent,” Mark Belko, a real estate
reporter, wrote in an email to
other members, calling it an
“outrage.”
For now, the union is in the
hands of a longtime colleague of
Mr. Fuoco, Mr. Blazina, a trans-
portation reporter who has
worked at the paper since 1983.
The accusations against Mr.
Fuoco came as “a complete, total
shock to me, and to this day I
know nothing firsthand about it,”
Mr. Blazina said. When asked
about Mr. Fuoco’s reputation for,
at minimum, being overly ag-
gressive with women at union
gatherings, he said: “I can tell
you — he wasn’t handsy with
me.”Decades of Inaction on Claims of Harassment by a Reporter
FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
JARED WICKERHAM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESA new generation
of union leaders
struggles with a
troubling legacy.
Michael Fuoco speaking in support of Post-Gazette journalists in June. He
resigned as the local union president in September and also quit the paper.JULIA MARUCA FOR PITTSBURGH CITY PAPERMEDIA
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