Apparently, there's trouble in populist paradise

Now, mind you, various passages in this article, which, if all details are substantiated, is quite a bombshell, have a hit-piece-y feel to them. But bear in mind two of the three authors have pretty impeccable conservative bona fides. Betsy Woodruff is a Hillsdale College graduate who, prior to her current gig at the Daily Beast, worked at National Review and the Washington Examiner.  Lachlan Markay reports for the Washington Free Beacon and formerly worked at the Heritage Foundation. It's true that the third author, Asawin Suebsaeng, used to write for Mother Jones. 

And it's so jam-packed with oh-my-word allegations that there is sure to be some pushback from somewhere - although a check of the front page at LifeZette at 10:45 a.m. didn't turn up any reference to it.

But check it out:

LifeZette, the politics and culture website founded by prominent ally of President Donald Trump and longtime talk radio host Laura Ingraham, is in trouble.

Traffic to the site—billed as the right’s answer to the massive HuffPost when it was founded in 2015—is minuscule, with an average of little more than 10,000 unique visitors per day in July, according to data from ComScore. LifeZette is also the target of a labor complaint aimed at its payroll practices from a former employee who says paychecks came sporadically and with little official documentation, according to documents provided to The Daily Beast.

Most seriously, according to seven sources currently and formerly employed by LifeZette, the organization has become a deeply uncomfortable place for women to work, with a top company official repeatedly making sexually suggestive comments about female employees—sometimes within earshot of those female staffers. 

Byron Martinez, LifeZette’s former broadcast engineer and IT administrator, recalled Peter Anthony, the site’s chief executive, “talking about other women’s boobs, butts… how he would desire sexual activities with [female colleagues] and stuff like that… All kinds of inappropriate talk about women in the office.”

Six other sources also singled out Anthony by name as the chief culprit. Anthony, a longtime friend and business partner of Ingraham’s, co-founded the D.C.-based site with her and oversees its day-to-day operations.

With the exception of Martinez, all sources spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity because they feared reprisal from Ingraham and Anthony.

Apparently the organizational culture has a strong party element:

LifeZette sources say Anthony not only frequently made sexually inappropriate comments about female employees, but also aggressively and profanely pressured staffers into taking liquor shots at company happy hours.

 

Joseph Curl's attempt to dismiss his status as a witness to some of this stuff is underwhelming:

Multiple sources described Anthony’s habit of gossiping audibly in the office—including to former senior editor Joseph Curl—about how a twentysomething female colleague must be “doing yoga because her ass was so good,” among other crude observations targeting specific female reporters.

In response to an email from The Daily Beast, Curl replied by writing, “So, Houston is under water, North Korea's firing missiles over Japan, the cost of health care has tripled under Obamacare, and you’re writing about -- LifeZette happy hours? No wonder so many Americans despise the media. Your ‘story’ is less than fake news—it’s utter bullshit.”

(The Daily Beast did not bring up happy hours with Curl in the prior email exchange, suggesting Curl had been in contact with someone else The Daily Beast had reached for this story. Anthony claims that he wasn’t in contact with Curl regarding the statement above.)

 

 

Apparently the lecher talk is just one aspect of an overall crazy environment:

Another succinctly described Ingraham and Anthony’s operation as “a kooky work environment” defined largely by “management by chaos,” with all seven sources echoing sentiments of poor management. 

 

Martinez says LifeZette operates in a pretty loosey-goosey fashion where money is concerned, too:

After Martinez resigned from the company this year, he lodged a complaint with District of Columbia employment regulators alleging that he was not paid in a timely manner, and not provided with pay stubs. According to documentation that Martinez provided to The Daily Beast, LifeZette received that complaint—and denied its allegations—this month.

Anthony reiterated that denial in an emailed statement. “Mr. Martinez was paid every two weeks and any issue with Mr. Martinez being unable to receive direct deposit or failure to pick up his paycheck should be directed to Mr. Martinez,” he wrote. “As I have already stated,” he said in another email, “these unattributed allegations are false.”
But not all of the allegations are unattributed, as his response to Martinez’s complaint indicates.

Martinez said that the company provided no meaningful recourse to address the alleged payment discrepancies. “I communicated this to our quote-unquote HR department, but that just didn’t seem to help because two to three weeks went by and I never got a response,” he said. “So I went directly to Pete and said ‘hey, what’s going on.’ He sent in the payment, but it continued month after month.”

Martinez oversaw the construction of a broadcast studio in the company’s offices. In that capacity, he said, he witnessed contractors go months without receiving their promised compensation. Separately, another former vendor told The Daily Beast that the site had reneged on a five-figure video contract, and that repeated efforts to elicit an explanation or a resolution from LifeZette leadership went unanswered. The contractor, who provided The Daily Beast with emails showing their repeated attempts to collect more than $15,000 in unpaid fees, asked to remain anonymous to avoid damaging other professional relationships.

Three LifeZette sources, including Martinez, say they never felt that internal complaints led to any meaningful resolution for either bookkeeping issues or what they describe as Anthony’s routine denigration of women in the office.

Martinez said he tried with little success to enlist an off-site human resources staffer to resolve his payroll problems, but that those problems continued.

“There were times that I was getting paid whenever Pete felt like paying me,” Martinez continued. “That went on for months... I gave them time, but then I began to see a pattern where I’m not getting paid on time.”

How about Ingraham herself? It seems detachment is the most appropriate characterization of her role:

A former employee who recalled multiple instances of inappropriate conduct by Anthony described Ingraham as “pretty harmless,” suggesting she was generally unaware of that misconduct. Aside from the occasional executive decision with respect to the site’s content, she wasn’t deeply involved as a manager, sources say.

“She would be in the office,” a former employee recalled. “For periods of time she’d come in, do the radio show, she might stay in her studio for another hour working with her producers, and then she would go leave to write her book.”

Now, something I've noticed about her, even going back to before the Trump phenomenon, is that, on television and radio, she always seemed like she was in a hurry, very high-strung. The ultimate Type A personality. That's probably why she has such an undeniably go-getter resume.

But she's an odd duck. A convert to Catholicism well into her adulthood. A thin record where relationships are concerned. (She was engaged once, but that ended just about the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Those are just the facts; I don't aim to speculate on the whys and wherefores given that I don't know her at all.) She's adopted three children, two from Guatemala and one from Russia, and pretty clearly relishes her role as a mother.

And LifeZette's editorial content reflects the lifestyle kinds of stuff she gets into on her radio show: how the way kids dress for school reflects our culture's decay and the like.

Some of LifeZette’s top content has included “What to Do If Your Teenager Is Promiscuous” on the “MomZette” vertical, “Why So Many Women Don’t Like the ‘F-Word,’” and controversial and since deleted posts promoting Clinton “body count” conspiracy theories. One such article was promoted under the banner of: “Could crossing the Clintons kill you?”

But then there is the way she has given Trump a total pass for being - well, what he is. There is the very, very - did I say very? - strange way she looked right past every one of the other sixteen GOP presidential candidates in 2016, including the obvious conservative choice (do I need to spell that out? Ted Cruz.) Well, she did take a few moments to deal with a couple of them early on. She actually made a strangely big deal out of Jeb Bush, on the basis of the big donors behind him and his family name, even though his polling was always dismal, thereby setting up a false dichotomy: "Your choice is between Jeb and Trump!") And Marco Rubio came onto her radar screen for a little while, because she found his Gang of Six involvement permanently unforgivable, which is in keeping with the outsized role she gives immigration among the issues on the nation's plate.

She digs the self-promotion aspect of her career, too. Book signing tours, opportunities to appear on Fox News as often as possible.

I don't claim to know what drives her at her core. I don't have to know to conclude that she has, over the last couple of years, morphed into something reprehensible.

In any event, she might want to chill a bit, take a deep breath, look into the culture at her company, and humbly examine what she's become.