Warning: Trigger alert — this may be very difficult to read as the content refers to sexual assault.
Hundreds of employees of a multi-billion dollar jewelry conglomerate claim that its chief executive and other bosses fostered a corporate culture where women were routinely groped, demeaned and urged to perform sexual favors just to keep their jobs.
Women at Sterling Jewelers, the corporation behind Jared the Galleria of Jewelry and Kay Jewelers, have filed more than 250 declarations alleging that their bosses sent scouting parties to find women they wanted to sleep with and pushed female employees to have sex with them in order to get promotions or even just to avoid punishment.
Even the CEO, Mark Light, has been named in the suit and accused of promoting women if they relented in the face of his sexual advances. That’s sexual assault. There’s only one thing Sterling can do to fix this: Throw. Him. Out.
Tell Sterling to commit to a zero tolerance sexual harassment policy and force CEO Mark Light to step down.
It must have been torturous for these women to file complaints. Some of them date back to the 1990s and one of the original women who brought the case forward in 2008 died in 2014 after the case dragged forward unresolved for years.
The details behind this class-action suit are disgusting. Many declarations mention the annual managers meeting where female employees were aggressively pursued, grabbed, harassed and preyed upon by their bosses.
Join us in signing a petition to Sterling’s CEO to immediately step down -- and take urgent steps to thoroughly investigate and reform the corporate culture of sexual harassment.
At SumOfUs, we believe women. That’s why nearly 30,000 of us stood up to a major Canadian airline after it was revealed that a stewardess was sexually assaulted by a pilot -- and then fired after she complained. It’s why hundreds of thousands of us stood up for Kesha when Sony forced her to keep working with the producer she says drugged and raped her when she was 19. We won’t stand idly by as corporations create and condone cultures of sexual assault and harassment. And we won’t let Sterling get away with this.
More information
Washington Post. 27 February 2017.
Cosmopolitan. 28 February 2017.