Madison reveals experiences working at LMG

[LogicalDrm]

8 minutes ago, iAxX said:

Expecting a 19 year old who thinks she's under NDA to hire a lawyer and build a case against a multi million dollar company for workplace abuse is a bit far fetched. 

Not to mention she was in a foreign country, 2000+ miles away from her parents with no support network. 

Thats not what I'm saying. I assume you are from US? Because that defense sounds like it. Canada has workers protection laws and agencies to make complaints to. If she had talked with others,there's more than one person saying things. Already better situation. Also, its 2020+. Distance doesn't mean anything. Phones work, Skype is a thing etc. She already was out of the company when the first public allegations were made. 

 

And for anyone who thinks I'm dumping on her, thats not my intention. I think at least some of what she has said is true, some partially true and some exaggerated to match her idea of what happened.

 

@digitalscream, also probably not helping that couple years ago going public was looked to be only real way to get things done. And maybe it worked for some, but then again, we don't hear about all of those things how those people are doing years after the fact.

[Orbital_Aurora]

2 minutes ago, SomeKittyKat said:

No matter if all this is true or false. At this point the people working at this company need to Unionize.

Linus said in a wan show he would see it as a failure but I sincerely think that once your company goes to the point of not being able to sit everyone in a room it is just an healthy thing to have.

[Swaza Ares]

innocent until proven guilty is true for both parties,

what most people don't seem to see is that until we have more to work off of we need to treat Madison's allegations seriously but not condemn LTT until more evidence come forward. If we see more people either former or current employees come forward with similar experiences than that would serve as evidence as well as any receipts Madison herself may be able to provide us. Its also possible that harassment was coming from one individual who from Madison's thread seems to be another employee and for all we know it could have been just one really shitty person who was responsible, in which case while LTT is ultimately responsible if they take steps to address these kinds of things in the future and take responsibility ill be happy with that. either way so far we have smoke, but we don't know if we have fire or if its all steam.

TLDR: we need to see more, other people coming forward or recites. 

[mrparker]

1 minute ago, hassam222 said:

Canada is a halfway point between the US and western Europe in that regard. Far stronger worker protection than the US but weaker than France.

The US is a benchmark that's very easy to pass, too. Good to know.

[Drevo Dano]

4 minutes ago, kw10001 said:

The fact there are actually people in this thread willing to brush this under the rug is depressing. 

Exactly. People will defend the behavior or say it's just an accusation. Was she supposed to record every conversation at work? She wouldn't have left so quickly if it was an amazing working environment.

[mrparker]

2 minutes ago, agent-09 said:

What I found fishy is the timing!!

If someone is ready to harm themself for a day off, I'm a little sceptical, you are not in North korea or in a prison, no one is forcing you to come to work.

i know that some times you might be in dark places.

If the workplace is not safe, quite, I know it's difficult to find other jobs, or the financial situation might be hard, but my will being is primordial.

Mental health is a silent struggle. I struggle myself with mental health, and honestly I empathize with her position especially.

 

It might not make sense to you but that literally doesn't matter. The overall culture sounds seriously toxic & that is unacceptable.

[Kravatie1]

1 minute ago, Swaza Ares said:

innocent until proven guilty is true for both parties,

what most people don't seem to see is that until we have more to work off of we need to treat Madison's allegations seriously but not condemn LTT until more evidence come forward. If we see more people either former or current employees come forward with similar experiences than that would serve as evidence as well as any receipts Madison herself may be able to provide us. Its also possible that harassment was coming from one individual who from Madison's thread seems to be another employee and for all we know it could have been just one really shitty person who was responsible, in which case while LTT is ultimately responsible if they take steps to address these kinds of things in the future and take responsibility ill be happy with that. either way so far we have smoke, but we don't know if we have fire or if its all steam.

TLDR: we need to see more, other people coming forward or recites. 

we need to see nothing, its between madison and lmg

[Orbital_Aurora]

2 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

Do you think LMG is going to file a defamation lawsuit to protect their reputation from the damage she may cause with these tweets?

I actually do not think they will. I am willing to bet their response will be "we could file for diffamation but we won't because we are such nice guys" where in reality a diffamation lawsuit could expose their bad management that was apparent for many years (Yvonne being "HR" while being the CEO's Wife is a huge red flag in any company)

[dogwitch]

4 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

Because unions never have toxic environments.  LOL

i am getting tired of religious lvl thinking of unions will fix everything.their perfection incarnate etc. 

people, idk why now. simple, dont care about fixing worker laws in what ever country  their in.

[silentdragon95]

4 minutes ago, wolfsbane3083 said:

Looks like LMG are actively deleting any comments made on their "apology" video about Madison....

If true then that is truly terrible. @LinusTech Do you think that censorship is the correct response? Because it sure isn't.

[Zberg]

20 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

I'm not really sure how this proves anything than her perception. Her whole claim comes off as a young adult entering a workforce with unrealistic expectations and getting reality checked, then pulling the mental health card.

 

I see this in my own high performing work environment in emergency medicine. 

 

And it is just a claim, there is no evidence. That's important to recognize. 

 

Maybe she does struggle, if so,that only furthers the perception disconnect..

 

I'm sure there are nuggets of truth in there, such as the difficulty females face in male dominated professions, but overall I highly doubt it's as she claims overall. Yvonne is pretty much the #2 there, and more so prior to the new CEO, I really don't see her standing for any of that. 

 

Regardless, I do not believe discussions regarding current or former employees are something any company should hold publicly. 

 

Ya, I posted a similar comment upthread.  We have seen this with an employee that was struggling with what was likely their first real, hard job.   

 

They are serious allegations, and need to be investigated.  If true, LTT would and should be in deep shit for it.  But there is a burden of proof you have to meet.   In a company where you have the head as a pretty progressive leaning guy, with a wife that  has a  huge role running the company with him that wouldn't allow this for  a second, you have to bring some evidence to the table IMO

[FerrisU]

19 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

She tells that she was tasked to manage the onlyfans account and she said she didn't want to and they told her to wait a little bit longer.

She tells it like she's a victim here and they were evil for asking her to "wait a little bit longer".

The hell?

She was the social media manager.

It's a job, you either do what you are asked to do or leave.

That's just disgusting. Unless her contract included her entertaining the audiences thoughts about having sex with her and her coworkers, looking at nudes, etc. Then she should've been under no obligation to do so.

[agent-09]

Just now, mrparker said:

Mental health is a silent struggle. I struggle myself with mental health, and honestly I empathize with her position especially.

 

It might not make sense to you but that literally doesn't matter. The overall culture sounds seriously toxic & that is unacceptable.

yes we all struggle with mental healt, life is not easy.

i can relate to to the struggle, but if you dont mant to healp yourself, no one will.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

10 minutes ago, BilLow5G said:

Man your points are so out of touch. People like you represent the main problem with the tech community. How can she not be a victim if she felt she was "grabbed inappropriately"?

Why do you people need to shit on someones feelings? What do you earn?

I don't like to be touched.
I find it disrespectful.
If someone touches me I feel grabbed inappropriately.
Once I was in a bar and a guy put a hand on my arm while talking to me.
I said to him that I didn't like to be touched and he kept doing it.

Did he inappropriately grab me? Was he a jerk? Yes. But it wasn't sexual assault.
 

[rubinos]

This is even worse than the other thing. They need to address this faster than the remarks from GN.

If only one of the things Madison said is true, then someone needs to be fired inmediately.

[JoshuaScholar]

1 minute ago, silentdragon95 said:

If true then that is truly terrible. @LinusTech Do you think that censorship is the correct response? Because it sure isn't.

I see some threads.

[Hendo16]

I understand people wanting to wait until more comes out and/or wait until LTT responds but too many in this thread alone are immediately jumping to play HR for LTT and deny, deny, deny. If you want to claim we should wait until we have all the facts until we start trashing Linus, fine, but that goes both ways. There's no legitimate reason we should dismiss any of this, let alone assume poor intentions on her part (because I'm sure she was really excited to paint a red target on her back and cop some of the most vile filth on the internet). There's a good chance we'd benefit from hearing other perspectives that I'm sure we will get in the next 24 hours but why anyone would dismiss everything in this so easily is beyond me. Linus doesn't know you exist and he never will, clearly none of us want any of this to be true but jumping to defend him with nothing more than "oh pfft why didn't she just sue" or "hmm i don't know why but she probably made this up" is next level fanboy behavior

[DaytonaDragon]

Fake. You don’t wait 2 years to come out with this if it was true. You also show evidence. And the timing is also suspicious. This whole thing sounds like another #metoo bs.

[digitalscream]

1 minute ago, LogicalDrm said:

@digitalscream, also probably not helping that couple years ago going public was looked to be only real way to get things done. And maybe it worked for some, but then again, we don't hear about all of those things how those people are doing years after the fact.

Also true. But...as I said, if she's right about any of it, then there's little other option - even if somebody's telling the truth, any legal process is still pretty much a coin-flip, and the consequences of that flip going the other way can also be pretty bad. It's a really precarious situation, where the only truly safe option is to simply take your lumps and stay quiet.

 

In truth, I think all the options available to her were equally bad, just for different reasons. That's why I don't really fault her for waiting until this moment to do it this way; right now is exactly when LMG's fan loyalty is at its lowest. Given the threats and harassment that she had at the time, I can see how she'd think this is a relatively low-risk opportunity.

[William Isted]

To anyone wondering why someone might not have taken their allegations to court and paid for the pleasure of defending themselves:

 

I have worked with people in toxic workplaces, witnessed open sexism, harrasment, been bullied and had my contracted hours made a joke of. I looked into going to a tribunal and the first thing that was asked for was any kind of proof. Verbal harrasment and the like do not leave a paper trail of receipts you can just pick up and take a company to court with. The best you might have in some of these situations are other employees speaking up and corroborating what you're claiming.

 

While you are working for the company still, going to other employees who rely on their jobs and asking for them to be witness to what had happened in the small chance that something happens based on speech alone is insane. I wouldn't have thought anyone would risk their jobs to provide a cocktail napkin of "he said, she said". I also told previous employees that I'd witnessed clear harrasment happen to that I would provide whatever I could to help them if they made formal complaints. They declined to follow it up. Why? Because unless it's recorded, in an email, on paper or has any other kind of *dated* evidence it will die before being considered legally.

[JoshuaScholar]

2 minutes ago, FerrisU said:

That's just disgusting. Unless her contract included her entertaining the audiences thoughts about having sex with her and her coworkers, looking at nudes, etc. Then she should've been under no obligation to do so.

It was a SFW April fools gag.

[jimmy3189]

Whoever hired madison made a grave mistake/didn't respect the workload that  social media requires.

 

Madison engineered this job position after being in a video in which she won a competition right? I think there's a lot to be said for a young person desperate to work for an organisation they idolise and then getting there and its just like any other media corp with ridiculous run rate of content. (brutal workload, fast paced environments, probably already cliques and teams exist as coping mechanisms in order to deliver what they have to deliver this can be hard to break down as a new inexperienced person)

That is not to belittle any of the other accusations she makes, RE: grabbing, bad HR. I am almost certain  the HR department in a youtube startup is going to be awful, I think  going in as an employee that's somewhat to be expected, they know how to make lots of videos fast, the landscape is constantly shifting and LMG simply grew too big too fast, I think most of the employees knew that mentality going into it.

This was madisons first job out of college, she was not having the best time emotionally with moving, family issues, possible mental health. LMG clearly did not handle any of this well, they should not have hired somebody with this experience for this position, terrible decision.

Once that mistake was made she should have been treated better, she wasn't, that was unacceptable. 

I hope the description of grabbing was simply an overstep in grabbing an arm or something, it seems unlikely to have been stronger based on the actions and statements around other companies having really bad accusations, the bad language I dunno, I work in Music Touring and people use just as filthy language all day, is  it acceptable? not really. Does it happen as a 'normal' workplace environment.... all the time.

I hope she's doing okay, I hope LMG get some proper HR practises in place. 

[mMontana]

@Riccardo Cagnasso I can understant that "no touch" is a thing for you. And maybe as a hairy, tall and strong man you can give a stare to say "don't touch me".

But you have not the feeling of being 50kg 1,60mt tall lady.

[gottahavit]

5 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

I'm not really sure how this proves anything than her perception. Her whole claim comes off as a young adult entering a workforce with unrealistic expectations and getting reality checked, then pulling the mental health card.

 

I see this in my own high performing work environment in emergency medicine. 

 

And it is just a claim, there is no evidence. That's important to recognize. 

 

Maybe she does struggle, if so,that only furthers the perception disconnect..

 

I'm sure there are nuggets of truth in there, such as the difficulty females face in male dominated professions, but overall I highly doubt it's as she claims overall. Yvonne is pretty much the #2 there, and more so prior to the new CEO, I really don't see her standing for any of that. 

 

Regardless, I do not believe discussions regarding current or former employees are something any company should hold publicly. 

 

Yeah she comes off as someone who was excited to go work with a group she thought was going to be a new friends and family job, and then reality set in and she was expected to work and to deal with problematic personalities(something you HAVE to deal with in any company).  If there was true harassment then you go to HR, if thee is no HR, then you get a lawyer, otherwise your just whining about your job after you left.  Probably a mix of dysfunction at the workplace and oversensitivity on her part.

 

The timing of this tells me she's just looking for notoriety now.

 

Either way this is something better of handled by the company behind closed doors.

 

[NavyEmt]

I hope LMG never dresses these allegations. This is why the should have a legal department in place for.