When the #MeToo movement began taking down powerful men across every industry from TV news to Hollywood to publishing, many wondered why Wall Street was largely unaffected, considering the financial-services sector has never exactly been overly friendly toward women. The answer, of course, was the widespread practice of forced arbitration, in which many firms require any new employee to sign away their right to sue the company, ensuring that all claims are heard (and resolved) privately. Not only do such provisions give the company the upper hand, sparing executives from potential embarrassment and shame, but they keep fellow victims from finding out about each others’ allegations and banding together in class-action suits.
If that sounds like bullshit, it’s because it is! In February, congressional Democrats unveiled a bill that would ban mandatory arbitration and that same month, Google said it would give employees the right to sue the company. Meanwhile, the women of Wall Street have been fighting the arbitration fight themselves, telling abusive co-workers, no, you can’t act however you want with impunity. One of those women is Lee Stowell, a former Cantor Fitzgerald broker whose story Bloomberg recounts today:
Lee Stowell couldn’t find her Bernie Sanders mug. It was August 2016 at the Summit, N.J., outpost of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street brokerage. The tension in the office was becoming unbearable for Stowell—and not only because her colleagues couldn’t stand the rumpled-haired socialist on her mug. For a while, work had felt like a throwback to the early days of her career, when traders could spew invective with impunity, and women had to stomach it or find a way to hold their own.
Stowell scanned her desk, then took her hunt to the kitchen. She opened a cabinet, saw Sanders staring back at her, and reached for the mug. “I looked in,” she tells Bloomberg Businessweek. “There was feces in it.”
Yes, that’s right: Wall Street can be that disgusting. Amazingly, when Stowell complained about the colleague she suspected of defiling her mug—a salesman whose “conservative views clashed with Stowell’s liberal politics”—her boss reportedly told her to “be respectful” of the guy. It was just one of a number of indignities Stowell allegedly suffered over the years—including having her butt grabbed in 2015, and then being asked by a colleague, “would you rather he grabbed your boobs?” Later, Stowell was told by the company that she was part of the problem and “ordered her to take a course on appropriate workplace behavior.” Shortly thereafter, she was dismissed as part of a round of layoffs.
Finally, in April 2018, Stowell sued, but the case was held up over the question of her being allowed to take her claims to a jury, or if she was bound to an arbitration agreement. Lawyers for Cantor, which told Bloomberg it couldn’t comment on the case, argued that “Stowell’s recollections don’t matter because Cantor has her signature on a 2007 agreement, plus an updated electronic version she clicked on in 2014.” Stowell’s lawyer, though, argued that workers cannot be bound to checking a box on some boilerplate legal language, to say nothing of the fact men will continue to act however they please—that they will, for example, shit in someone’s mug—if they know their company will simply force women into arbitration. And, fortunately, a judge agreed!
Stowell have a better chance in court, but the threat of a trial almost certainly gives her leverage over Cantor in any settlement negotiations. There’s another reason she’s fighting to get to court: She says she wants to help harassment victims escape forced arbitration. That can happen only with new laws, widespread retreat by corporations, or favorable rulings from judges. That’s why, when Stowell learns the New Jersey judge has rejected Cantor’s request to send her to arbitration, she starts to choke up.
The judge found that the employment policy Cantor sent digitally in 2014 replaced the 2007 contract that the firm claimed she’d signed. The newer agreement told employees to click a box that said they’d read and accepted the terms, language the judge said wasn’t thorough enough. Employees have to be told loudly and clearly, the judge wrote, that they’re agreeing to give up their right to sue.
Unsurprisingly, Cantor and the men named in the suit are appealing the decision, but unless they’re successful, Stowell will get her day in court. Which should probably be a lesson to a number of people as we head into the 2020 election season.
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Trump allies have some advice for the president: S.T.F.U.
Of course, he won’t:
His Twitter feed has lit up each morning with angry posts about Mueller’s conclusions (“total bullshit,” he said of the report a day after its release)—21 tweets on the subject since the findings went public, at last count, along with four re-tweets. He’s ripped into congressional Democrats for subpoenaing an unredacted version of the report and its underlying investigatory materials. . . . White House allies are starting to worry that Trump’s inability to move on to other subjects, or at the very least stick to playing up Mueller’s conclusion that his campaign did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government, is doing more harm than good. One former Trump campaign official described the president’s post-Mueller volley as “a complete and utter disaster,” suggesting that Trump is likely to generate another negative news cycle for himself when he sits down for an interview with longtime pal and Fox News host Sean Hannity Thursday night.
“Obviously it’s not a smart strategy,” a former White House official told Politico, noting that, unfortunately, there are “very few” staffers left who are likely to tell Trump to put a sock in it. “He needs to let it go. It’s especially not helpful to him, but he just can’t help himself.”
Mick Mulvaney: the West Wing is awesome now that we’re rid of that killjoy John Kelly
It’s all fast-food and rage-tweeting, the way the new chief of staff apparently thinks life in the most powerful office in the world should be:
“When I got here, morale wasn’t what it needed to be,” Mulvaney told us. “I don’t think I’m telling any secrets—John hated the job. And let everybody know.” He cheerfully extolled his relationship with Trump, joking that he’d gained 10 pounds since becoming chief. (“I eat more with the president now,” he said. “He eats hamburgers all the time.”) . . . Mulvaney’s first order of business as chief of staff was to loosen the strictures that Kelly had put in place. The retired four-star general had tried in vain to bring some discipline to a freewheeling White House, instituting tighter controls on who was able to see Trump and what information people were able to give him.
Mulvaney’s allies say there is value to his more casual approach to the job, because it’s made the West Wing a happier place to work. “He has re-energized the position,” says Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser. . . . But his detractors see a chief of staff who’s overseeing ever more chaos—and whose nontraditional approach has rendered the position almost meaningless.
These people, of course, are obviously haters and losers, since clearly this administration is the very picture of order and stability.
Elsewhere!
Biden Enters 2020 Democratic Presidential Race (W.S.J.)
Uber Aims for an I.P.O. Valuation of as Much as $90 Billion (Bloomberg)
Elizabeth Warren’s loan forgiveness plan won’t be the windfall for the rich some feared, study says (CNBC)
3M Rout Deepens Toward the Worst Sell-Off Since Black Monday in 1987 (Bloomberg)
Despite Trump’s tariff and border threats, Mexico is now the largest U.S. trading partner (The Washington Post)
How climate change could trigger the next financial crisis (MarketWatch)
Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs Turned Her LLC into a VC Machine (Bloomberg)
Trump could stiff-arm Democrats until after 2020 (Politico)
Steve Cohen Is Helping Elon Musk Avoid “Bonehead” Questions (Bloomberg)
Princeton valedictorian gets engaged to her 71-year-old former professor (N.Y.P.)
“Lethal sausages dropped from planes” (N.Y.T./)
More Great Stories from Vanity Fair
— Cover story: Nicole Kidman reflects on her career, marriage, faith, and texting with Meryl Streep
— The investigations that could haunt Trump
— A mega-church pastor’s drug-running hustle
— Elizabeth Warren’s new approach: courting Game of Thrones fans?
— Why L.A. is ground zero for the next tech apocalypse
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