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A Year of #MeToo Exhausted Women—And Renewed Our Collective Hope

Last week, Bloomberg published a weird statistic. By their count, at least 425 people—nearly all of them men—had been accused of sexual misconduct since the publication of sexual assault and rape accusations against Harvey Weinstein in The New York Times a year ago. Bloomberg called the figure “conservative,” clarifying that it only accounts for accusations described in the media against “prominent” people (their analysis is based on news headlines reporting on accused people) . What’s more interesting is that the figure—accompanied in Bloomberg’s reporting by graphs showing the popularity of the “#MeToo” hashtag and the frequency of sexual assault stories in the media over the past 12 months (disregarding the movement’s previous origins, when it was begun by Tarana Burke in 2006)—reflects a pointed understanding of the events of the past year. In Bloomberg’s view, the #MeToo movement that has exposed massive numbers of sexual assault and harassment allegations can be seen as a quantifiable trend, able to be captured as a data set and documented on a scorecard of lost male power.

The focus on once-invulnerable men brought down within big-paycheck industries by public airing of their own behavior—makes for a compelling story: that of men’s dramatic falls from grace. For survivors of sexual violence, the past year has meant something very different. In the wake of the Weinstein allegations, many of those survivors, who are overwhelmingly women, felt a renewed license and urgency to discuss their own experiences of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape in the service of positive social change.

I witnessed women’s eagerness to tell their own stories intimately last October, when I created a Google spreadsheet that I titled “Shitty Media Men” and made it available for women in my industry to anonymously document their experiences of rape, assault, and harassment. The document sparked controversy, and I was eventually forced to make my identity public in an essay for The Cut under threat of doxxing.

While the #MeToo movement led to a reckoning in several high-profile industries, as the Bloomberg story indicates, it also reverberated in blue-collar workforces that are not typical sites of media attention, including the Ford Motor Company plants in Chicago, where women workers raised the alarm about pervasive misconduct, and the fast food workers at McDonald’s restaurants nationwide who went on strike to demand an end to the sexual harassment they face.

This hasn’t exactly been easy for many of the people who have come forward, and those who have privately contended with the constant news cycle rooted in rape and sexual harassment and assault. The glut of assault stories and recounted trauma has placed a strain both on survivors’ resources and on advocates’ energy. “I’ve basically had a video of my rape playing on repeat in my head for the past year,” one friend told me, echoing a sentiment I’ve heard from many survivors both in my personal life and in my reporting. “That part doesn’t feel empowering. It feels oppressive.” Over the past year, the National Sexual Assault Hotline, a crisis line for survivors of sexual violence, has seen a 30 percent increase in calls. The hotline had the busiest day in its 24-year history on September 28, the day after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

For many who work as organizers, activists, providers of resources for victims, or public commentators, the continual public focus on testimonies of sexual assault has at times been vexing, re-traumatizing, and otherwise difficult to endure. When I spoke to a number of public feminist activists, writers, and #MeToo voices over the phone this weekend, one word they all used was “exhausted.” They were exhausted, they told me, by continued sexist disbelief of survivors, and by powerful men’s indifference to survivor’s pain. Most of all, they were exhausted by the ordeal of listening to survivors’ stories—hearing and thinking about sexual assault consistently for a year.

Many of the women I spoke to were survivors who have uncomfortably recognized elements of their own rapes and assaults in the stories, often detailed, that are shared with them by friends and sources, or which they read about in the media. This is what happens when you hear a large number of sexual assault stories: Other people’s traumas become your own.

Jessica Valenti, the author and founder of the feminist media site Feministing, told me that she’s coping with the barrage of sexual assault stories by cultivating a kind of selective unfeeling. “It’s just an overwhelm of pain, and I’m at the point where my brain has enacted this sort of protective measure for me to be able to get through the day.” She said that the feeling reminded her of her emotional response when she gave birth to her daughter three months early. “We weren’t sure she was going to live. I developed this intense detachment that later turned into PTSD. That’s how I feel now.”

I can relate to Valenti’s self-defensive numbness—in part because the whole of the suffering that the #MeToo movement seeks to make consequential is just too big to comprehend. My mind stretches to collapse trying to get around the breadth of it. Take Bloomberg’s “conservative” number of 425 accused perpetrators. How many victims is that? They don’t say. How many moments of shame or fear is it? How much embarrassment and anxiety has been felt? How many flashbacks videos played in the mind? How much lost time and lost potential? You can’t get your head around it. It feels too devastating to try.

When I talked to Soraya Chemaly, the media critic and author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, she cautioned me against despair. “Exhaustion is a tool,” she told me. “They use it to deplete us, to wear us out.” She was talking about the Republican Senators who pushed the multiply accused sexual assault perpetrator Brett Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, but she could have been talking about the forces of misogyny and inequality that women face in general.

I think she’s right—among those who advocate for justice, exhaustion, numbness, and the desire to protect ourselves from pain can lead to the collapse of the fight, if people need to make the choice to opt out. It can help the forces of inequality prop themselves up and become stronger. But the alternative is for feminists to shoulder on through all the exhaustion, pain, and disappointment of doing this work. If we do that, we risk doing our enemies’ work for them: We could destroy ourselves. Activists have long cautioned against the personal toll that their work takes on them, emphasizing that, because their work often requires them to expose themselves to brutality, that they should guard against symptoms of anxiety and PTSD. Research backs them up: A recent study of surviving ACT UP New York members found that nearly 20 percent experience current symptoms of PTSD. “I wish feminists had a structured way—like some sort of tag team—of passing the baton periodically,” Chemaly said, “to take care of ourselves and avoid burnout or despair.” We laughed, but she was only half-joking.

Chemaly stressed that #MeToo is not unprecedented—that it in fact has what she called a “hashtag genealogy” of feminist first-person popular movements meant to help ameliorate the norms around sexual violence and sexual harassment. She mentioned 2014’s #YesAllWomen, a viral campaign that highlighted the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, and #NotOkay, the hashtag that arose in 2016 following the release of Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, in which the then-candidate could be heard bragging about sexual assault.

The fight, Chemaly reminded me, is an old one, and other feminists I spoke to also pointed out that #MeToo is part of a much longer tradition—and that this sense of exhaustion that many feminists are feeling is as old as organized feminism itself. Women have been telling stories of assault and misconduct for so long, in different forms and in different settings for decades, recounting our traumas in public over and over again: The plight of women who face violence by men was made a part of the public conversation in the suffrage movement, in the temperance movement, and in 19th-century discussions of women’s introductions into industrial employment in places like the Lowell mills.

Mariame Kaba, the educator and organizer whose nonprofit advocacy group Survived and Punished works to free incarcerated victims of sexual and domestic violence, compared #MeToo’s utilization of women’s first-person testimonies to “consciousness-raising,” an organizing tactic that originated in the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Consciousness-raising consisted of small, in-person groups of women who met in kitchens, coffee shops, and university classrooms to discuss the impact of sexism in their own lives. The aim was to detect commonalities and patterns among women’s experiences, and, as the name suggests, to “raise consciousness”—that is, ideate how to apply feminist ideas to their own daily lives. The major groups fizzled out in the mid-1970s, but the tradition of speaking out about one’s own life as a way to move forward collectively lived on—as is very visible on social media in campaigns like #MeToo.

Consciousness-raising and tactics like it have always frustrated feminists, too. “Even back in the second wave, they realized that consciousness-raising wasn’t enough,” Kaba told me. Talking about the problems that sexism posed in their lives and identifying these problems as gendered made individual women feel better by giving them strength, community, and the knowledge that they were not alone. But it did not change their lived circumstances, nor prevent the same standing prejudices and inequalities that affected them from future suffering—it was therapeutic, Kaba told me, but it wasn’t the same as political organizing. The philosopher bell hooks summed up the complaints this way: “Feminist consciousness-raising has not significantly pushed women in the direction of revolutionary politics.”

At an academic conference called “Me Too and Epistemic Injustice” that I attended at the CUNY Graduate Center this past weekend, the CUNY philosophy professor Miranda Fricker put it this way: #MeToo, she says, has changed what she calls the “credibility climate”—the movement has advanced avenues for victims of sexual violence to be believed, both by institutions responsible for investigating allegations and by the people around them. But even when allegations are taken seriously or proven in this new credibility climate, the resulting knowledge—that the accused person has committed a sexual assault, that the accusing person was a victim of it—is not seen as a reason for corrective and rehabilitative action from those in power. Basically, Fricker posits that #MeToo means that more survivors are being believed when they come forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault. That doesn’t mean that the people or institutions that they come forward to are doing anything about it.

The gulf between the emotionality of women’s testimony and the failure of that testimony to affect a change in their lived circumstances has been one of the most searing things that #MeToo has forced us to confront. Women can tell our stories of assault, rape, and harassment all we want. It will not matter if those in power do not want it to. I didn’t feel this way at the beginning of the movement, when powerful men appeared to be losing their stature and their reputations under the force of women’s testimony. It did not feel good to see these men punished, exactly, but it felt good to see women’s voices mattering, their testimonies given credence, and their experiences granted consequence. But a year in, when the predictable comebacks of predators have been launched, legal consequences have been few and far between, and the self-pitying essays by predators have been published—when the knowledge that a multiply accused sexual assaulter sits in the White House and another one has been rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court—it is hard not to feel despondent, hard not to feel that women telling our stories has failed to effect the change we hoped that it would.

The visible effect is not on the structures of patriarchy, which remain intact, and not in the distribution of political, economic, and social power, which is still disproportionately held by men. The most visible effect is that we—feminists, women, and people who have experienced sexual violence—are all very tired. Maybe it’s counterintuitive to say that the feminists I spoke to all gave me a great deal of hope for the future of #MeToo and the wider feminist movement. All of them were angry, burdened by grief over what sexual assault survivors have endured, afraid of a future in which women’s rights will be eroded further, and, yes, exhausted. They were all also determined, more alert to the challenges facing the movement, and more defiant and tenacious in the face of them.

It is useful to remember that even if consciousness-raising isn’t sufficient for social change, it is always a prerequisite. If we cannot name our oppression—if we cannot articulate the violence that has been done to us—it will be impossible to fight against it, or to prevent it from happening again. If women did not talk about our problems, we would not have domestic violence shelters, women’s self-defense classes, the criminalization of marital rape, legal prohibition against sexual harassment in the workplace, nor popular understandings of date rape, victim-blaming, and slut-shaming.

At one point in our conversation, Kaba told me that she hoped the movement would help feminists “collectivize our suffering, and collectivize our care”—to become more alert both to the ways that those around us have hurt, and more alert to how we can lift one another up. In #MeToo’s sharing of grief, and collective demand for change, this is already happening.

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At Vice, Cutting-Edge Media and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment

One woman said she was riding a Ferris wheel at Coney Island after a company event when a co-worker suddenly took her hand and put it on his crotch. Another said she felt pressured into a sexual relationship with an executive and was fired after she rejected him.

A third said that a co-worker grabbed her face and tried to kiss her, and she used her umbrella to fend him off.

These women did not work among older men at a hidebound company. They worked at Vice, an insurgent force in news and entertainment known for edgy content that aims for millennial audiences on HBO and its own TV network.

But as Vice Media has built itself from a fringe Canadian magazine into a nearly $6 billion global media company, its boundary-pushing culture created a workplace that was degrading and uncomfortable for women, current and former employees say.

An investigation by The New York Times has found four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees, including its current president.

In addition, more than two dozen other women, most in their 20s and early 30s, said they had experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct at the company — unwanted kisses, groping, lewd remarks and propositions for sex.

The settlements and the many episodes of harassment the women described depict a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice, where women said they felt like just another party favor at an organization where partying often was an extension of the job.

What stands out about the women’s accounts — in the wake of a public reckoning over sexual assault and harassment by mostly older men — is that the allegations involve men in their 20s, 30s and 40s who came of age long after workplace harassment was not only taboo but outlawed.

“The misogyny might look different than you would have expected it to in the 1950s, but it was still there, it was still ingrained,” said Kayla Ruble, a journalist who worked at Vice from 2014 to 2016. “This is a wakeup call.”

Vice and its co-founder and chief executive, Shane Smith, have long been open about the company’s provocative atmosphere. But Vice is now struggling to reconcile its past — famous for coverage of streetwear, drugs and sex, as well as its raucous parties — with its emergence as a global media company backed by corporate giants like Disney and Fox.

In a statement provided to The Times, Mr. Smith and another co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, said “from the top down, we have failed as a company to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.”

They said that a “boys club” culture at Vice had “fostered inappropriate behavior that permeated throughout the company.” The company distributed a longer version of the statement to its employees on Saturday.

The company said it has been taking steps to transform itself in recent months as the national debate over sexual harassment reshapes workplaces, and as it became aware that The Times and other news outlets were working on articles about the experiences of women at Vice.

Vice has formed a Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board, which includes the feminist icon Gloria Steinem and is led by the lawyer Roberta Kaplan; hired a new head of human resources; and terminated three employees for what it called behavior inconsistent with its values. It also forbade romantic relationships between supervisors and their employees — which several current and former employees said were not uncommon and led to many problems.

The settlement involving Vice’s president, Andrew Creighton, was struck in 2016, when Mr. Creighton, 45, paid $135,000 to a former employee who claimed that she was fired after she rejected an intimate relationship with him, according to people briefed on the matter and documents viewed by The Times. The woman declined to comment and asked that she not to be identified to protect her privacy.

Earlier this year, the company settled for an unknown amount with Martina Veltroni, a former employee who claimed that her supervisor retaliated against her after they had a sexual relationship, among other allegations, according to people briefed on the agreement and documents viewed by The Times. The supervisor, Jason Mojica, the former head of Vice News, was fired late last month. Ms. Veltroni declined to comment.

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And last January, Vice reached a $24,000 settlement with Joanna Fuertes-Knight, a former journalist in its London office, who said she had been the victim of sexual harassment, racial and gender discrimination and bullying, according to documents viewed by The Times. Among Ms. Fuertes-Knight’s claims were that a Vice producer, Rhys James, had made racist and sexist statements to her, including asking about the color of her nipples and whether she slept with black men. Ms. Fuertes-Knight, who is of mixed race, is bound by a confidentiality agreement and declined to comment.

Mr. James was put on leave in late November, according to a Vice spokesman. In the settlement agreement, both Vice and Mr. James denied any liability. Mr. James did not respond to messages sent seeking comment.

A fourth settlement, struck in 2003, involved claims that Vice defamed a female writer by publishing that she had agreed to have sex with a rapper whom she had interviewed, when she had not.

In response to questions about the settlements, a Vice spokesman said that the company had made “few settlements” over its 23-year history and that no Vice employee had been involved in more than one. “In some cases, it’s clear that the company and our managers made mistakes,” the company said. “In others, we disagree with the way in which the underlying facts have been characterized.”

Details about the settlements and the culture of the company are based on interviews with more than 100 current and former Vice employees. As word spread within the media industry that The Times was reporting on Vice, more than a dozen women and men contacted The Times with accounts that they said were humiliating and emotionally traumatic. Several broke confidentiality agreements to speak on the record, but many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing those agreements and fear of reprisal.

The Times also examined more than 100 pages of legal documents, emails, text messages and other filings related to Vice’s operations, the settlements and allegations of harassment.

In their statement, Mr. Smith and Mr. Alvi said the problems “happened on our watch and ultimately we let far too many people down. We are truly sorry for this.” They also expressed “extreme regret for our role in perpetuating sexism in the media industry and society in general.”

The Early Years: A Cowboy Culture

A brash maverick and consummate salesman, Mr. Smith, 48, transformed Vice from a free magazine in Montreal into a global company with roughly 3,000 employees, a television network, a digital footprint, a film-production company as well as a daily news show and documentary program on HBO.

Along the way Mr. Smith regularly mocked traditional media companies as stodgy and uncreative. But in recent years he set about courting conglomerates like the Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox, which were eager to profit on Vice’s cachet with millennial audiences. The latest round of investment gave the company a valuation of more than $5.7 billion.

Behind that ascent, however, is a more disturbing aspect of Vice’s operations. People involved with Vice during its early days described a punk-rock, male-dominated atmosphere in which attempts to shock sometimes crossed a line.

In a 2012 interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Smith recalled his earlier days with Vice. “I would be at the party and would just want to get wasted, take coke and have sex with girls in the bathroom,” he said.

In 2003 Vice reached a $25,000 settlement with the freelance writer Jessica Hopper. The deal involved defamation claims tied to an interview she did with the rapper Murs that was published in the February 2003 issue of the magazine, according to a copy of the agreement viewed by The Times. During the interview, Murs asked Ms. Hopper if he could have sex with her. She said no and included that answer in her article.

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But before the article was published, the magazine changed her response to yes and printed it under the headline, “I Got Laid But Murs Didn’t.”

Mortified, Ms. Hopper hired lawyers. The two sides struck a settlement that, in addition to a payout, required Vice to print a retraction and a formal apology.

“People marveled at their ability to make their own rules and blindly disregard everyone else’s,” Ms. Hopper said in an interview. She declined to comment on the existence of a settlement.

“The editor of the piece at that time has not been with the company in a decade,” Vice said in a statement. “Ms. Hopper was right to call us on our conduct at the time, and we are still ashamed of it.’’

Mr. Smith, who had long celebrated a life of hard-partying excess, married a woman in 2009 who had worked at Vice and started wearing suits to the office, current and former employees said. But they also suggested that he oversaw a company where issues of sexual misconduct and harassment festered.

In their statement, Mr. Smith and Mr. Alvi admitted that dysfunction and mismanagement from the company’s early days “were allowed to flourish unchecked.”

Women said that they felt that rejecting sexual advances from bosses could result in reassignment or lost work, and that when they reported problems, executives downplayed the allegations. Some said that while they considered taking legal action, they thought they lacked the financial resources to sue and feared that Vice would retaliate.

“There is a toxic environment where men can say the most disgusting things, joke about sex openly, and overall a toxic environment where women are treated far inferior than men,” said Sandra Miller, who worked as head of branded production at Vice from 2014 to 2016.

She said that as a 50-year-old woman she did not face harassment but witnessed “the complicity of accepting that behavior, covering up for it, and having even the most progressive people look the other way.”

The workplace problems were particularly disappointing, many women said, because they had viewed Vice as their dream opportunity. The company didn’t pay well, some said, but it was the definition of cool for those who wanted to create entertainment and journalism on the cutting edge. The company bestowed select staff members rings that spell V-I-C-E — considered the ultimate prize.

People worked long hours and partied together afterward. And that’s where the lines often blurred. Multiple women said that after a night of drinking, they wound up fending off touching, kissing and other advances from their superiors.

Two women told The Times about episodes involving Mike Germano, Vice’s chief digital officer who founded Carrot Creative, the digital ad agency that Vice acquired in 2013. Amanda Rue, a former strategist, said that at Carrot’s holiday party in 2012 Mr. Germano told her that he hadn’t wanted to hire her because he wanted to have sex with her.

Gabrielle Schaefer, who worked closely with Mr. Germano as director of communications at Carrot, said he made her feel uncomfortable during a work event at a bar one night in 2014 when he pulled her onto his lap. After Ms. Schaefer reported the incident to human resources, she said, she felt that she fell out of favor at the company and eventually left.

“Carrot has been repeatedly recognized as one of the industry’s best places to work, and I do not believe that these allegations reflect the company’s culture — or the way we treat each other,” Mr. Germano said in a statement. “With regards to the incident with Ms. Schaefer, I agreed at that time it was inappropriate, I apologized, and it was resolved with the help of HR.” He said that days later Ms. Schaefer joined his family for dinner and that they “continued to work together amicably.”

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In the settlement involving Mr. Creighton, the woman claimed she felt pressured to submit to advances he made during a series of work meetings from 2013 to 2015, according to people familiar with the matter and letters sent between lawyers for the woman and Vice.

In a letter to the woman’s lawyer, Vice denied the allegations and said the woman had initiated and pursued a sexual relationship with Mr. Creighton. The company said in the letter that her termination was based on poor performance.

The dispute was settled in December 2016 after the woman filed a complaint with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (She withdrew her complaint as a condition of the agreement.)

In a statement, Mr. Creighton said that he and the woman were “close friends for several years before she joined Vice,” and that they were “occasionally intimate” once she began working there. He said he was not involved in the decision to let her go.

“I apologize for the situation, and it has caused much thought in my responsibilities of care for my colleagues, and I will hold myself and others accountable in constructing a respectful workplace environment.”

Agreements Encourage Silence

Executives erected a wall of silence around the company. Employees were required to sign a confidentiality agreement when they joined Vice, stating that during and after their employment they would not publicly disparage the company, according to a copy viewed by The Times.

Until recently, Vice also required employees to sign a nontraditional workplace agreement acknowledging that they would be exposed to explicit, potentially disturbing material but that they did not find such content or “the workplace environment” to be offensive or disturbing.

Some employees said that they took the agreement to mean that they could not complain about issues of harassment.

Vice said the agreement “was always meant to address content — it had nothing to do with conduct,” and that when it learned the language was causing confusion, it eliminated the agreement.

In the months before the Columbia Journalism Review published an article in 2015 about the culture at Vice, and was looking into the treatment of women at the company, lawyers for Vice warned at least one former employee, Murray Waas, who had worked as an investigations editor, about “his strict confidentiality obligations’’ and of the financial penalties he could face for talking to another media outlet.

“I am sure he knows Vice will pursue all of its remedies aggressively,” Michael Delikat, a partner at the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said in an email sent to Mr. Waas’s lawyer, a copy of which was viewed by The Times.

In a statement, Vice said, “NDA’s have been a standard part of settlements in all cases in all industries for years and years,’’ adding, “This is not a letter we would send today.”

Asked whether the company would release current and former employees who had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment from their confidentiality agreements, the company said: “Like many other companies and policymakers, we are watching developments and considering the issue.”

When the Columbia Journalism Review published its article, it included a quote from Nancy Ashbrooke, the former human resources director at Vice, stating that since she joined the company in 2014 sexual harassment had “not been an issue.” (Ms. Ashbrooke worked as vice president of human resources at Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films from 1991 to 2000.)

Current and former employees disputed Ms. Ashbrooke’s statement.

Kate Goss, a former project manager at Vice, said that in the summer of 2015 she reported an incident that occurred after a work event to her bosses and human resources. She said that on the Ferris wheel at Coney Island a creative director put her hand in his crotch without her consent. Ms. Goss said Ms. Ashbrooke told her there needed to be multiple incidents in order for her to take action against the other employee.

Ms. Goss discussed the incident with a co-worker at the time, which The Times confirmed.

Abby Ellis, a former Vice journalist, said that in 2013 Mr. Mojica, the former head of Vice News, tried to kiss her against her will. She said that she yelled at him and hit him with an umbrella multiple times. She said that she faced other unwanted advances from Mr. Mojica after the incident.

Ms. Ellis said that after the episode she felt that their relationship soured and that she was missing out on newsroom opportunities, so she reported it to Ms. Ashbrooke. Ms. Ashbrooke responded by telling Ms. Ellis that because she was an attractive woman she would face similar behavior throughout her career. Ms. Ellis discussed the episode with several co-workers at the time, which The Times confirmed.

“As women, we get harassed everywhere and we don’t feel compelled to report it because it’s not considered a reportable offense,” Ms. Ellis said. “We’re expected to put up with it; it’s the cost of doing business.”

Mr. Mojica said that he remembered “misreading a moment and foolishly trying to kiss Abby” but that the episode had a “very different tone.” He added, “I was quickly rebuffed, and I immediately apologized.” He said he thought the incident had “no impact” on their professional relationship.

Two years later, Helen Donahue, a former employee, reported to Ms. Ashbrooke that Mr. Mojica had grabbed her breasts and buttocks at a company holiday party. Ms. Donahue said that Ms. Ashbrooke told her that the incident was not sexual harassment but rather someone making a move on her.

“She said I should just forget about it and laugh it off,” Ms. Donahue said.

Mr. Mojica said that while he recalled talking to Ms. Donahue at the party, he did not “remember doing anything of the sort.”

Ms. Ashbrooke, who left the company in recent months, said in a statement: “As a woman and HR professional, I support anyone who believes they have been mistreated and throughout my career, I have worked to help companies build respectful workplaces with no tolerance for inappropriate behavior.”

The settlement involving Mr. Mojica came after lawyers for Martina Veltroni sent a letter to Vice outlining her claims that her relationship with Mr. Mojica derailed her career at Vice, according to letters sent between lawyers for the woman and Vice.

In a letter to Ms. Veltroni’s lawyers, Vice denied the allegations against Mr. Mojica and said that Ms. Veltroni was trying to “recast her consensual and desired sexual relationship with her former supervisor” into a claim of harassment.

Mr. Mojica said that he had “never retaliated against” Ms. Veltroni and that he was not involved in the discussions with Ms. Veltroni’s lawyer or the resulting agreement.

On Nov. 30, after a report appeared in The Daily Beast on Vice’s culture, and aware that The Times was investigating its workplace, Vice announced that it had terminated three employees, including Mr. Mojica, for “behavior that is inconsistent with our policies, our values, and the way in which we believe colleagues should work together.”

Mr. Mojica said he was not given a reason for his termination.

Efforts at Reform

Vice said that it has updated its sexual harassment policies, clarified sexual harassment reporting procedures and created an employee hotline. The company also said that it has made a commitment to reaching gender pay parity by the end of 2018, expanded maternity and paternity benefits, and introduced mandatory respect and sensitivity training for all employees.

The company’s new human resources director, Susan Tohyama, has retained an outside investigator “to conduct investigations into current or historical workplace issues that are brought to our attention.”

Vice’s recent efforts at reform have had some stumbles, though. In mid-November top managers conducted a “state of the union” session with employees that did not include any mention of sexual harassment, an issue that was roiling workplaces around the country.

Many employees said they found the session tone deaf, prompting Mr. Smith to send a note to the staff that night saying that “we missed the mark, especially when it came to clearly addressing issues around sexual harassment at Vice.”

“Yes, we can change the world,” he wrote, “but first we have to start at home.”

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Modeling And The Tragedy Of Karen Mulder

The news that '90s supermodel Karen Mulder was arrested in Paris for making death threats to her plastic surgeon could be written off as, at worst, a punchline, or at best, the latest expression of an unbalanced woman's erratic behavior.

Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me." 

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile. 

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

 The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts.

 It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

 But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.