Former and Current TMZ Employees Allege Misogyny, Racism in Buzzfeed News Exposé
Charley Gallay/Getty Images
23 former employees and one current employee of celebrity news site TMZ alleged that the company fosters a “toxic workplace where the staff regularly endures verbal abuse, misogyny, racism, and other inappropriate behavior,” according to a BuzzFeed News report.
The employees came forward and spoke to BuzzFeed after an ex-colleague filed a lawsuit against TMZ parent companies Warner Bros. Entertainment and EHM Productions, alleging gender discrimination and retaliation.
BuzzFeed wrote that TMZ did not respond to immediate requests for comment, but that an anonymous current employee denied discrimination in hiring or firing practices at the company.
“If you’re talking about the rights of Black people, if you’re talking about misogyny, if you’re talking about equality amongst everyone, it’s never reflected in the workplace,” one employee told BuzzFeed. “We’re reporting on all of that stuff, but we’re not doing it ourselves.”
The employee added that there are barely any women in senior roles and claimed that the company only hires people of color because they feel like they need to and not because they value them.
Several employees came forward to claim that the workplace environment is toxic for women, alleging that senior-level TMZ executives, including TMZ founder Harvey Levin, mistreat their female employees despite the #MeToo movement, Buzzfeed reports.
“How they treat women in a demeaning manner transcends to how they represent women on their site. The two go hand in hand,” a former Warner Bros. employee said. “It’s just a toxic environment of extreme measures of blaming, scapegoating, bullying, harassing people to get what they want, and being biased against women,” another former employee said.
“Are you surprised that the person who has made a career off of getting everyone’s dirt, are you surprised when that guy is not being cast out?” one former TMZ employee said of Levin.
Former male employees also claimed that some senior-level TMZ executives not only made sexual comments about female employees but also showed them porn on their computers.
Another employee claimed they had to take medical leave due to the stress they endured working at TMZ, adding that they eventually quit because the environment was so toxic. The employee also detailed how Levin used to scream at them so often that they “felt like a scared dog.”
“Nothing was rational,” they added, according to BuzzFeed. “The things that [Levin] would decide that he liked were based on his feelings that day. It wasn’t based on a formulaic structure, so there’s no way that you could anticipate what he was going to like and what he doesn’t like. It was insane.”
