Are You the Target of a Smear Campaign?
Stage 3 of Covert Workplace Abuse
I have been writing about the 10 stages of covert workplace abuse. I wrote about the first stage, love bombing or grooming, and stage 2, knowledge theft here.
Stage 3, the smear campaign, is hard to write about because so much of it happened behind my back, so I only know a few pieces of the puzzle. When researching how covert abuse works, the smear campaign jumped out as the key to explaining why I was suddenly removed from my job without warning or explanation after years of documented successful performance.
I do have one powerful piece of evidence: my “360 performance review”. It’s clear that my review was sabotaged by my abuser. He was a volunteer where I worked, and he offered to write and conduct the review. (I was naïve and had no idea how this was supposed to work.) Here is how he did it:
He wrote subjective, leading questions designed to get negative reactions.
He asked me for names to include, but did not contact one of the 5 people I suggested, despite them all being relevant.
Instead, he asked external people I had little to no interactions with but worked for competing organizations, so had reason to say negative things.
He included himself as a survey participant.
He summarized the results in a biased way to present to my superiors who never bothered to ask for the underlying data. (One asked after it was too late.)
The results of this subjective and biased review represented the beginning of the end for me. There was also a healthy dose of sexism baked in, which I have written about before. For example, I was told I did not “play well with others”, which seemed utterly ridiculous given that I had built a networking organization that relied on partnerships and cooperation. But once a few biased men complain in a survey that gets summarized by a pathological liar, your objective performance flies out the window.
Then the review results became the “baseline” of what I would always be judged against. Yet I never was I offered any measures of what improvement or success looked like. I was thrown onto a playing field without knowing any of the rules or where the goalposts were. The fix was in.
Later, I learned additional evidence about the smear campaign including: The leader of a competitive organization referred to my abuser as his “mole”. (The abuser volunteered for both orgs.) Also, apparently rumors were flying about me at an industry trade show that I helped launch. You just cannot make this shit up.
The most critical piece of evidence of the smear campaign came when the boom was lowered; I was told that a donor had “complained” about me but not told who it was or what they said. It seemed like an ultimatum was presented: that this donor would only give my organization funding if I was out of the way. Why was I not allowed to know who this was and what was said? How could leadership accept such a threat? (More on institutional betrayal in a future post.)
This is how covert smear campaigns are so damaging and dangerous: the victims often don’t get to know the full details or to defend ourselves. To this day (over three years later) I am still left wondering, what the hell happened there?
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