Legal Settlements are Nothing to Celebrate

Correcting misunderstandings from recent lawsuit news

Last week I sent out a short note about the announcement that Miyoko’s Creamery had dropped its lawsuit against the company’s iconic founder, Miyoko Schinner.

Several readers reached out to me with misguided celebratory tones in the wake of this news so I wanted to send out this correction of sorts.

When a founder (or any employee really) is abused the way that Miyoko Schinner was by her board, in the end, there is nothing positive that comes out of the situation.

Being abused at work can be extremely traumatizing, with multiple layers of betrayal and other forms of psychological violence. I wrote about the devasting impacts of workplace betrayal before:

Betrayal is defined as “when someone you trust breaks that trust by doing something that hurts you.” It’s that broken trust that is especially painful. Working relationships inherently require people to trust each other. Trust is also required to create strong bonds. So a betrayal of trust immediately breaks those bonds, and that’s where the trauma comes in. When someone you thought you could trust betrays you, your connection is lost. And when it happens so suddenly, it can be traumatic.

I also wrote about how smear campaigns can destroy your reputation. Most relevant here is what I wrote about the final phase, the witch hunt:

Management has made a hasty decision to get rid of the founder, CEO, or other senior executive. Chaos ensues, because after all, they just completely destabilized the company or organization by suddenly removing its leader. In addition, the target may try to fight back, especially if it’s to save her own company.

Now management realizes they have botched things, so they must now justify their bad decision-making. Instead of trying to course-correct, management engages in a witch-hunt to “prove” they made the right decision. The original abuser is right there helping them dig up more dirt.

All kinds of crazy accusations can get made at this stage. Anything you do can be used against you. They will take a kernel of truth and blow it all out of proportion. Make a minor mistake? It becomes a federal offense. For example, twisting something you did innocently or with permission, which is then denied by the person in power who granted you permission. You could be accused of stealing company property or sharing trade secrets, or other unethical or even potentially illegal activity.

The goals of the witch hunt include to:

• Intimidate and scare you into backing down from fighting them.

• Justify their hasty, incompetent, and cruel treatment of you.

• Prove to other decision-makers who may still on the fence, or having second thoughts, that you really must go.

• Stop these decision-makers from speaking with you as a human, to isolate you from anyone who might be helpful.

• Mitigate their potential legal liability in a wrongful termination action.

• Minimize any potential payout in severance or other settlement agreement.

All of this adds up to one singular goal: To weaken and destroy you. This happened to me, and to many other women in the natural foods sector.

By the time negotiations come around, you are so worn down and defeated that you simply want things over with. The damage is done. And to make things more traumatizing, they will make you agree to never speak of what happened again.

I wrote about the trauma of being silenced here and quoted an expert:

“Healing from significant trauma often depends on the support we have around us and being able to vocalize to them what happened. NDAs can in these instances be seen as an added layer of trauma after the event itself, as they effectively prevent us from processing the event with others in a way that feels right for us.”

And all of this just scratches the surface of the fallout from the sort of workplace abuse that I and others like Miyoko Schinner have experienced.

Moreover, a settlement usually means zero accountability for the perpetrators of the abuse in the first place, and that is certainly the case here.

So please, don’t celebrate that it’s “over”, because the ongoing pain (and healing) can last for years.