Uber Ex-engineer Who Alleged Sexism Retains Lawyer (usatoday.com)

Marco della Cava and Jessica Guynn, writing for USA Today: The former Uber engineer whose critical blog post has stirred a storm of controversy for the ride-hailing giant has retained an attorney, charging that her former employer is blaming her for a rash of app deletions. Susan Fowler, whose Feb. 19 essay detailed myriad examples of sexism, tweeted Thursday that "Uber names/blames me for account deletes, and has a different law firm - not Holders (sic) - investigating me."

Comments

Re:which car company?

[thinkwaitfast]

They're releasing an app for that.

Re:... uh

[quantaman]

Right... if she's just retaining a lawyer now after posting that shows some lack of planning on her part. Regardless of the truth of her claims, she had to figure that she would be charged with defamation based on the heavy claims she's made against a aggressive company.

Why? She wasn't suing them and her claims were verifiable, the logical response from Uber was ignore or apologize. A smear campaign, if that is what's happening, would be a really stupid response on their part.

It should be noted from the article that it's not even clear that someone is going after her, or if Uber is that someone. I wouldn't be surprised if some MRAs weren't taking it upon themselves to make an example of her.

Wait a min...

[bobbied]

So, now after her Blog post might have caused a PR nightmare for Uber, they are apparently strong arming her by hiring a law firm to "investigate" her? This is NOT good for either party here. Lady, it's time to fie suit or apologize.

Now I have no first hand knowledge of either party, but it sure seems like Uber is convinced that she cannot substantiate her story about what happens inside Uber so they are going to legally muzzle her to stem the PR damage she's doing. My guess is Uber has determined that just letting this go and weathering the PR storm is not in their best interest, that they need to take some kind of legal action to stop this woman from making her claims. They didn't choose to settle with her, pay her to be quiet or even sue her (yet) and are willing to keep the story alive. They apparently believe they can make this stop by taking action faster than letting the news cycle run it's course.

Uber is either being uber stupid or this lady is making stuff up. I'm thinking that's it is more likely this lady is making stuff up and Uber is making legal moves to stop her from lying about them. Uber may not be totally ethical at times, but I don't think they are stupid...

One thing is sure, now that lawyers are involved on both sides, nothing good is going to happen.

Re:Wait a min...

[barc0001]

If this was out of the blue, that might be a reasonable question.

However, Uber being a sexist and shit place to work is well known gossip in the vallet tech scene, and add to that the fact that you've got the SVP of engineering resigning last week for not disclosing his sexual harassment problems at his former employer - Google, AND there was the dashcam video of Uber's shithead CEO badgering one of his drivers. So with all of that in hand, it's not hard to see Uber as a company with a systemic problem of harassment. Plus, she states in her post that she does in fact have documentation:

" I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn't the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them - she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie)."

If she actually has copies of the documentation, chat logs and emails, then Uber doesn't have a pot to piss in, metaphorically speaking.

Re: Victim Blaming?

[phantomfive]

Victim blaming happens far less than false claims

I don't know, I feel like it happens every single time one of these stories comes up. It's important to figure out the truth in these situations, but the rest of us who are not involved can calm down, step back, and wait until the truth actually comes out instead of trying to blame.

Re: Victim Blaming?

[lactose99]

>Victim blaming happens far less than false claims.

This is the most demonstrably false statement I've read in quite a while.