Lady Business: What to do about April Bloomfields; Black voter magic

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the tenth issue, published December 14, 2017.
 

Pigs, Spotted

I’m feeling conflicted this week about April Bloomfield. It's a little about her, and a lot about what she stands for in the current #MeToo era.

Professionally and personally, I’ve long been a fan of Bloomfield. I’ve assigned and edited stories about her, in part due to her position as one of the better-known and more successful female celebrity chefs. And personally, I like the restaurants she co-owns with Ken Friedman. This weekend alone, I got a drink at the Breslin and I bought lamb chops at the White Gold butcher counter.

But then there’s this:

“I went to April directly multiple times about Ken’s inappropriate and abusive behavior, because among other problems, it generated huge turnover among the staff,” said Natalie Freihon, a former food and beverage director for the group’s ventures at the Ace Hotel New York, including the Breslin and the John Dory. “She really didn’t want the turnover to continue. But she completely backed off from getting involved with the behavior.”

Ms. Bloomfield denied that. “In the two matters involving uninvited approaches that were brought to my attention over the years, I immediately referred both to our outside labor counsel and they were addressed internally,” she said in her statement.

That’s hardly the most awful part of the New York Times’ expose this week on Friedman, Bloomfield’s longtime business partner. His long career of assaulting and harassing the women who worked for him included effectively pimping out employees to equally gross friend Mario Batali, apparently known as “the Red Menace.” (The first time I went to the Spotted Pig, recently out of college and new to New York, my friend Audrey and I sat two tables away from Batali. Suddenly that feels less like a fun New York celebrity story and more like a bullet dodged.)

The Times also reported on the Spotted Pig’s clubby third floor for VIP guests, including Batali: “Among employees and industry insiders, the third-floor space has earned a nickname: “the rape room.” I’ve joked here about Matt Lauer’s “rape button” in his NBC office, but at least NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY CALLING IT THAT.

Most of the article is focused, as it should be, on Friedman’s awfulness; but it also raises the questions of what Bloomfield knew, and when, and what she did or didn’t do about it. That strikes me as fair and not particularly gendered; his own alleged conduct aside, Bob Weinstein has faced the same questions about what he didn’t do about his brother’s monstrosities. If you go into business with someone, you have to assume some responsibility for how you both manage joint employees. (Even if you’re one of the only women to claw your way to the top of your field, and you’re staying there thanks to your reassuring white dude partner, the one who can bro down with investors and celebrities and prominent robe-wearing journalists and get you the buzz you need for your very hard work-while-female.)

And yet. How disappointed should I be in April Bloomfield? In Charlie Rose’s producer, Yvette Vega? In Hillary Clinton, who took campaign help from Harvey Weinstein after her staff reportedly had been warned that he was a rapist? In the women named in the NYT’s extensive story on Weinstein’s “complicity machine”?

Are we right to hold these women responsible for the sins of their business partners and investors? What if these women actively ignored reports and complaints from employees about their partners? How about if these women were complicit in firing or otherwise retaliating against any employees who complained?

I don’t have a good answer for this. Rebecca Traister addresses its nuances in her latest piece for New York Magazine:

When stories about the webs that protected Harvey Weinstein or Charlie Rose get published, the women — often women who are themselves anomalies within male-dominated institutions and cultures — get the most attention: Hillary Clinton’s (rather than Bill’s) friendship with Harvey Weinstein is craven, while Nancy Pelosi’s words about John Conyers are parsed more closely than anything uttered (or not uttered) by any one of his male colleagues. Rose’s producer Yvette Vega, who didn’t address the complaints of women who’d been harassed is seen as a more sinister villain than her dick-flashing boss.

None of this is an exculpation of those women, or of any of us who have, frankly, lived in the world ruled by men and tried to make our way in it. When individual women, no matter how powerful, climb to their perches through a system that was not built by or for them, then their grip on power has never wholly been their own. It’s always existed in relation to the men they must work with, protect, acquiesce to, apologize for, or depend on for support.

It’s a damning catch-22 for any woman with professional ambitions and the will to withstand all of the ugliness of the modern workplace. Stick it out and you demonstrate grit and luck and survival—all of which makes you a hero to any women coming after you, who look up to what you’ve endured and hold you up as proof that they, too, can make it. Now you’re a role model, whether or not you want the title, whether or not you want the burden and the annoyance of being called a “top female chef” or an outlier or a breaker of the glass ceiling.

Because what you’re also probably demonstrating is compromise and selfishness. At some point in your (our, my) career, you’ve likely made a decision to seek power at the implicit expense of others who would hold you up as a hero. It’s a rigged system, as Traister points out, and often the choice is either to compromise yourself or to quit. But for those of us in the middle – those of us still hoping to achieve some ambitions, and still looking for role models to reassure us that it can be done, and maybe also still somewhat idealistic about what can be achieved on merit and hard work and principle alone – it's an uncomfortable and bitter realization.

So I don’t entirely blame women like April Bloomfield for failing to stop their business partners’ abuses. But I can’t help being deeply disappointed.
 

Black Voter Magic

The problem, and what [many feminists today] are not saying,” said Steinem, “is that women of color in general—and especially black women—have always been more likely to be feminist than white women. And the problem I have with the idea that the women’s movement or the feminist movement is somehow a white thing is that it renders invisible the people who have always been there.”

A timely reminder from Gloria Steinem in this week of a pedophile’s defeat at the hands of black voters, especially black women. (It was another shameful electoral outing for white women, two-thirds of whom voted for the guy who cruised Alabama malls for their teenage daughters and sisters and selves.) The Cut has a good roundup of practical ways to thank and support black women, including donating to Higher Heights, an organization that helps these women run for office.
 

Lady Bits

--The serial creepiness of Judge Alex Kozinski, the powerful federal appeals judge who likes to show his female assistants porn, already feels buried under this week’s news. But I’ve long been a fan of Heidi Bond, one of said assistants, who now writes smart and progressive and feminist romance novels under the pen name Courtney Milan. One of my recent favorites: her novella about a black woman “computer” in the 1880s.

--What I’m watching: Someday I’m going to have to write my ode to Bones, the best have-it-on-in-the-background procedural TV show I miss as a distraction in these crazy days. (Sure, Alabama narrowly avoided electing a racist child molester and New York is apparently hosting terrorist amateur hour this fall, but at least no one you know has been cooked to death in a tanning bed, right?) Fortunately Lucifer is kind of scratching that itch of wacky-crime-plus-fun-characters TV. I’m also enjoying the early seasons of Person of Interest on Netflix, although like all things Christopher-or-Jonathan Nolan, it's missing a sense of humor. Well, mostly. Eventually someone realized the comic possibilities of Jim Caviezel's wooden affect.

 
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