Nike’s Oregon headquarters was — is? — an unsupervised playground for male executives who would get “sloppy drunk” and sexually harass female employees, according to four-year-old complaints just now unsealed as part of a lawsuit against the company.
The Beaverton, Oregon-based sports apparel company’s then-CEO, Mark Parker, apparently ignored his female employees’ complaints. Parker resigned as CEO in 2020 but still serves as Nike’s executive chairman.
The allegations include the company acting as a “boys club” where women are told to “dress sexier” and “show some skin.” Another woman claims to have walked “into a campus gym to find a senior staffer receiving oral sex from a female subordinate.”
A third complainant alleged that “sloppy drunk” executives pawed at women, or offered career mentoring over dinner but instead asked for sex.
More:
“I have twice reported bullying by a senior VP and HR said they would ‘take care of it,’ ‘we are coaching them.'” that respondent wrote, adding that she saved copies of emails to HR, which were ultimately never addressed.
“I have friends who have reported bullying,” the woman wrote. “No action was ever taken except a ‘we will talk to them.'”
After all that, you have to wonder if the “talk” consisted of, “Hey, buddy, did you score?”
Nike denies the allegations, and yet hundreds of employees “marched in protest of the company’s treatment of women at its headquarters” in 2019. That’s more than a year after the company failed to respond to the complaints unsealed this week.
This protest comes about a month after Nike was hit with a damning op-ed in the New York Times by running prodigy Mary Cain that highlighted the obstacles female athletes have faced while training with Salazar, the coach of Nike’s now-shuttered Oregon Project.
When she arrived at Nike for training, Cain said the all-male staff, including Salazar, told her she needed to be “thinner and thinner and thinner” if she wanted to improve as a runner. She also said she was “emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto [Salazar] and endorsed by Nike.”
Nike was one of the first major corporations to go woke, embracing Colin Kaepernick to the tune of a million dollars a year or more.
After criminal and drug addict George Floyd died of a fentanyl-induced heart attack during yet another arrest, here’s what Nike had to say:
Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America. Don’t turn your back on racism. Don’t accept innocent lives being taken from us. Don’t make any more excuses. Don’t think this doesn’t affect you. Don’t sit back and be silent. Don’t think you can’t be part of the change. Let’s all be part of the change.
Accusations of abuse are nothing new for Nike. They were one of the first companies I can recall accused of using overseas sweatshop labor (or even slave labor), paid pennies an hour to produce $300 sneakers.
Why does it seem like wokeness always turns out to be just a cover for predatory men to get away with whatever they like against women — and now children, too?
Oh, right. Because it is.
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