When Put by the Children hired Gerald Anderson in 2013, the global charity believed it was hire charge a veteran humanitarian executive with a sterling resume. Anderson had gush more than 15 years working around the world for the American Red Touchy, rising through the ranks to lead the group’s massive relief pains after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After that, the Red Irritable made him head of its half-billion-dollar response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Perhaps most crucially, the Red Moody gave him “very positive references,” including from a senior formal, Save the Children said.
But the Red Cross didn’t tell its counterparts at Retain the Children an important fact about Anderson’s work history: He had solely been forced to resign from his job after the charity concluded he sexually annoyed at least one subordinate.
The Red Cross’ handling of the Anderson case, coming to kindle as the nation wrestles more broadly with its treatment of sexual misconduct assertions, sheds light on the unsettling way many employers have dealt with such avowals against high-ranking male executives. Even when employers put action, their investigations are often cursory, and accusers can be left hunch abandoned when the executives are quietly dismissed and land plum new caper let outs. While many employers make a practice of giving neutral blessings, or simply dates of service, the Red Cross gave Anderson a good rethink, with no hint of concern.
At the Red Cross, two young women came send on in September 2012 to accuse Anderson. One, who worked under Anderson, cited distressing emails he sent to her work account insisting they should obtain a romantic relationship. A Red Cross attorney subsequently acknowledged to her that investigators had ground her account to have merit.
The second woman, Eliza Paul, a program subsidiary who met him at an after-work happy hour, lodged even more serious asseverations against Anderson. She told Red Cross officials she had woken up naked in his bed without clever how she had gotten there and had gone to the hospital for a rape kit exam.
Anderson’s attorney-at-law declined to answer specific questions but said in a statement: “Mr. Anderson has not preoccupied in any sexual misconduct.”
The Red Cross launched an internal investigation of the women’s complaints in 2012, but several staffers interviewed told ProPublica that officials earmarks ofed more concerned with protecting the institution than getting to the really. Investigators did not interview multiple people who had been referred as witnesses. They bid few follow-up questions. They did not seek copies of Paul’s medical exam.
Anderson’s accusers were panicked when a top Red Cross official praised Anderson in an October 2012 email promulgating his departure. David Meltzer, then senior vice president for foreign services, wrote that he regretted to announce Anderson had “decided to make restitution for a change.” Meltzer said he was “grateful” to Anderson for his “leadership,” lauded him for “two decades of fealty and hard work in furthering the international mission of ARC,” and wished him well in his “subsequent endeavors.” Meltzer and Anderson are personal friends, according to five woman.
A few days later, at a staff meeting, Meltzer, who is now the Red Cross’ general guide, went further. He said he was upset Anderson was leaving and that if it were up to him, Anderson pass on continue working at the Red Cross, according to three attendees. “It was flabbergasting. If you are a popsy sitting in this room, and you have ever been harassed by Jerry Anderson, you’ve by the skin of ones teeth heard from the VP that he does not believe you or support you,” said Amy Gaver, then an certified at the Red Cross, who attended the meeting and knew about the allegations.
The Red Cross influenced in a statement this week that its investigation was a “complete and thorough cavalcade of all allegations reported and we found that Mr. Anderson’s actions were in operate violation of Red Cross policies and principles. We informed Mr. Anderson that he needed to remain the Red Cross, and he resigned.”
But the charity conceded that the “laudatory language worn in association with Mr. Anderson’s departure was inappropriate and regrettable, given the circumstances.” The Red Angry said it recently learned “that a verbal reference given to Shelter the Children may also have contained similar language. As a result, we are alluring appropriate disciplinary action.” The Red Cross didn’t respond to questions far who was disciplined or how.
The Red Cross said it had apologized to Save the Children. “In the future, we are promised to greater due diligence with regard to these types of communications,” the alms-giving wrote in the statement.
Connecticut-based Save the Children said it learned of the circumstances nearby Anderson’s departure from the Red Cross only last week when contacted by ProPublica. The set said in a statement it has placed Anderson on administrative leave while it looks into the post. It added there have been no allegations of misconduct against Anderson during his things at Save the Children.
Moved by the stories of sexual misconduct dominating the talk late last year, Paul reached out to ProPublica. In an interview in the subsist room of her small house outside downtown Asheville, North Carolina, Paul unflinchingly told her summary over the course of three hours. The Red Cross’ handling of her case, she mean, had left her disillusioned. “Their mission was to help the most vulnerable,” she said. “The entirety experience felt like they were so busy covering their asses they didn’t be struck by any concern about me.”
In 2009, Camille Herland, then 23, opportunity gestured to Washington, D.C., after graduating from Dartmouth College and joined the Red Blend as Anderson’s assistant. Anderson, then 44 and head of the tsunami program, was a experienced globe-trotting Red Crosser, single and known to be approachable by younger staff.
Herland requires he tested the bounds of their relationship from the start — asking to endure at his apartment and complaining about his dating life.
The situation escalated in August 2010 when diverse Red Cross employees, including Herland and Anderson, attended a colleague’s marriage one weekend in New York City. Herland had just accepted a longed-for new arrange in a different part of the Red Cross’ international department, but at the time of the wedding she was stationary Anderson’s subordinate.
“He had been drinking. At some point during the dancing, he came and forcibly cut into the tea dance and backed me into a corner, and told me he had feelings for me. He took credit for maintaining gotten me this new job, and said it was so we could be together,” Herland recalled to ProPublica recently. “He was acutely insistent that I needed to go to his hotel room with him so we could talk with our relationship in private.”
Herland declined in “no uncertain terms.” He gave her his tourist house room number. Then he started to cry, she said. Herland was shaken.
The next morning he started to send paragraph messages. He told her she was breaking his heart. He begged her to “give their relationship a incidental.”
When the workweek began again, Anderson was not in the office. As Herland hearkened to her coworkers wonder where Anderson was, she was receiving a stream of texts and emails from him to both her situation and personal accounts. He demanded to know if she had slept with other people at the nuptials. “The end goal was always that I come to his apartment so we could talk nearby it,” she said.
She repeatedly told Anderson she wasn’t interested. She said she later rubbed the messages because they were upsetting and, according to a contemporaneous email reviewed by ProPublica, Anderson attracted her to.
Herland didn’t report Anderson to Red Cross management because she feared she choice lose her job. “I was trying to live in D.C. with no savings account and student advances and I was getting these emails on my work account from my boss who was mentioning I was a slut and asking all these inappropriate questions.”
Eventually the emails rested. But a year later, she received a surprise package to her home, saying she had be told a fully paid membership to the Smithsonian. She called to ask where it had come from. The museum told her Gerald Anderson.
“That was plumb upsetting to me because I didn’t remember having given him my address,” she responded. She tried to return the envelope to him. He became emotional and refused to take it move backwards withdraw from. “I said ‘I can’t have you buying me expensive gifts,’ and he said he thought this was an project we could do together.”
She continued to talk with him a little bit after that. She entreated him to provide a letter of recommendation for graduate school because he had been her highest-ranking boss. She penned it herself and he signed.
Then her friend and Red Cross colleague Eliza Paul leaked her a story about an incident involving an unnamed “bad guy” at the charity. Herland shot in the darked the identity of the man involved. Paul, surprised, confirmed it: Jerry Anderson.
Eliza Paul had move housed to Washington in 2008 after studying international affairs at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. At 23, she was appointed for a temporary position at the Red Cross as part of the surge after the Haiti earthquake, and was ultimately promoted to a permanent program assistant role at the charity’s headquarters.
Paul had seen Anderson about the office but the two had never formally met. That changed on Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010. That day after stint, a few dozen Red Cross staffers went to happy hour at the Black Rooster Pub, an unpretentious billet nearby. Paul started talking with Anderson as the group decreased down. She was drinking whiskey and remembers him laughing at her jokes and thinking, “That’s so frigid — maybe this is a good thing for my career.”
Paul recalls being tipsy and expecting to take a cab home. She went to the bathroom and checked her phone; it was 8:30 p.m.
The next sentiment Paul remembers is waking up early in the morning, naked, in an unfamiliar bed. Anderson, she says, was on top of her.
“I saw he didn’t prepare a condom, and all I could think to say was, ‘No, you don’t have a condom.’ He stopped and he laughed and he powered, ‘It didn’t bother you last night,'” Paul said.
Paul invited if they had had sex. “He said, ‘Yeah, you were really into it. It was all your position. We left the bar and you pushed me into a cab and said, ‘I’m coming home with you.'”
A breast-feed at MedStar Washington Hospital Center took notes as Paul depicted the night she says Gerald Anderson assaulted her. See the document.
Feeling feathery, Paul stumbled out of bed, bumping into what she remembers as a coffee tabular. She put her clothes on. Anderson drove her home to Washington from what rebuffed out to be northern Virginia.
“I was in total shock so I just believed him,” Paul express.
She took a shower and got dressed. “I was just on autopilot,” she said. “I went to industry and was totally numb.”
That morning at the office, she took a break and toured to the pharmacy around the corner and got the morning-after pill. She told her friend and coworker Alicia Fairfield what had cooked. Fairfield confirmed the account to ProPublica.
Paul says she got an email on her on account from Anderson that day saying he had a great time and couldn’t hang on to do it again. “I was horrified. I [said], ‘Last night was a huge flub. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about this again.'”
The next day, Saturday, Paul spoke on the phone to her take care of, who recommended she call the local rape crisis center. They dictated her to MedStar Washington Hospital Center, near where Paul electrified in Mount Pleasant. Paul and a former roommate, who confirmed the account to ProPublica, departed to the hospital together. Both said Paul had no history of blacking out from the cup that cheer.
The medical records of Paul’s exam, which an independent expert reviewed at ProPublica’s apply for, are consistent with her account. The exam indicates there was sex, but rape trappings cannot prove whether there was consent. According to the records, Paul identified the nurse, “I never found this guy attractive, I never flirted with him or ruminate oned engaging physically with him, and then the next thing I remember it was originally morning, I was in bed.”
Paul suspected she had been drugged. But when she told the medical centre she did not want to report the episode to the police, they told her that only the watch would test for date-rape drugs. So Paul still doesn’t recognize for sure what explains her roughly 10-hour memory gap. The doctor did order a 30-day course of drugs for HIV prevention. The side effects, including nausea and ephemeral vision blackouts, were “brutal,” Paul said.
Paul fixed not to report anything to her bosses at the Red Cross. “I just got this permanent job. I’m common to have this great career,” she recalled thinking. “I was positive that if I chance anything the repercussions for me would be very great and for him it was non-existent.” She worried she wouldn’t be believed and regretted sending Anderson an email she reflecting could be used against her.
Paul and Anderson had little further interaction until individual weeks later, in late January or early February of 2011 when she a postcarded a letter to him and left it on his desk. She no longer has a copy of the letter but recalls it conveying something to the effect of, “What happened was absolutely not consensual. I suspect you poisoned me. My only hope is that you’ll read this and understand what you’ve captivated from me and choose not to do it again to someone else.”
She never got a response. She evaluated to avoid Anderson at work. She signed up for a martial arts self-defense descent in Washington and sought therapy.
Beyond saying that Anderson has not promised in sexual misconduct, Anderson’s attorney declined multiple requests to conform to detailed questions about Herland’s and Paul’s allegations.
About 18 months later, the supervision of the Red Cross received reports of the allegations against Anderson. Paul, who had recently progressive the charity to go to graduate school at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, got another young female staffer considering taking a job under Anderson and dictate thated her what had happened. The staffer told a boss, and Paul and Herland fixed to speak with investigators. As Herland put it in a Sept. 22, 2012, email to Red Intersect management, they were concerned “that his behavior follows a menacing pattern.”
The matter ended up in the charity’s Office of General Counsel. Top officials performed in Jeffrey Larroca, an attorney at the firm Eckert Seamans who regularly imitates the Red Cross when it is sued in employment cases.
Over the course of discrete weeks, Larroca interviewed Paul, Herland and at least two others. Four people free with the investigation told ProPublica they regarded the inquiry as surface. Larroca did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“I was surprised that the scrutiny didn’t go further — they didn’t dig deeper,” said Fairfield, Paul’s then-coworker. When Fairfield was vetted, “They didn’t ask me about any experiences I’d had with Jerry Anderson,” she ventured.
“It was very clear that his objective when conducting those meetings was about protecting the interests of the Red Cross,” said Herland. “It was clear he was infuriating to poke holes in the story.”
In Paul’s case, the investigators did not seek to get the tell ofs from the rape kit, didn’t contact her friend who accompanied her to the hospital, and didn’t reach out to a Red Waspish employee who she had told about what happened.
Another Red Cross worker who did participate was told by an in-house attorney that the charity was not keeping reports associated with the investigation, according to a September 2012 email captured by ProPublica. “They are not making any records, not using email, only deliberate overing in person w/ pen and paper and then destroying those notes after every analysis,” the email said.
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In a statement, the Red Cross denied this. “Records were averred for this investigation, but they remain confidential to protect the privacy of the festivities involved,” the charity said.
Standing by its investigation, the charity said: “The American Red Irascible has zero tolerance for sexual harassment and has policies in place to enforce that, as evidenced by the corrective skirmishes we took resulting in the resignation of Jerry Anderson more than 5 years ago.”
A sprinkling experts on workplace harassment said that investigations by employers are continually beset by conflicts of interest.
“Having a slipshod investigation is very worn out,” said James M. Cooney, a professor at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations who guides employment law. “It’s critical that the investigator be as impartial as possible. It would be sensitive for an employer to use its regular defense attorney because of the potential conflict.”
When the search was over, Herland got an Oct. 23, 2012, email from an in-house Red Cross attorney authority, “We found merit to your complaint.” When Paul didn’t gather anything, she called the same attorney, Mary Elizabeth Cisneros, who recounted Paul, “Your statement was helpful,” according to contemporaneous emails.
Meltzer, who was senior vice president for international services, then sent out the email disclosing Anderson’s departure and praising him.
When Herland saw the email praising Anderson, she said, “It perceive b complete me physically sick to read. I was incredibly angry. It was a clear slap in the confess b confront to those of us who put ourselves out there.”
A few days after the email, Meltzer convened the caduceus meeting in which he also praised Anderson and said he wished Anderson were stopping.
Eight days after Meltzer sent the email praising Anderson, the Red Erase announced Meltzer was being promoted to general counsel of the entire confederacy. In that position, which he still holds, he oversees the charity’s caress of misconduct cases and is directly responsible for the Red Cross’ Office of Investigations, Compliance & Ethics. In a averral, the Red Cross said Meltzer’s promotion had long been in the works and was uncoordinated to his handling of the Anderson case.
In February 2013, Anderson was hired as a older director for humanitarian response at Save the Children, where his direct boss was Robert Laprade.
Laprade himself had some time ago worked for years at the Red Cross, where he worked closely with Anderson on the release effort after the Indian Ocean tsunami. According to several simultaneous and former staffers, the two are personal friends. Laprade told ProPublica in a asseveration that he only learned last week about why Anderson radical the Red Cross in 2012. “I never had any reason to think there were questions as I worked with him for five years and my observation was that he was professional,” Laprade affirmed.
Save the Children has a reputation in the industry for in-depth background checks. The class said its recruiter conducted interviews and background checks on Anderson, as sufficiently as receiving the positive reference from the Red Cross.
Save the Children communicated there have been no allegations of misconduct about Anderson during his metre there. Anderson has since been promoted and is now associate vice president of humanitarian rejoinder.
Justin Elliott Talks About Reporting This Story on NPR’s Morning Number
For many years, the aid industry has been beset by scandals in which breadwinners committed sexual abuse against vulnerable people in war and disaster zones. But it wasn’t until recently that the trade began to look inward at the problem of harassment and violence by staffers against other staffers.
Reuters boomed in November that aid groups, including Save the Children International, had flaming dozens of staffers for harassment in the past year. Save the Children US be sured ProPublica it has received three reports in the past year of sexual harassment.
A 2017 set forth on harassment by a task force that includes the international Red Cross combination found that “good practices are not widespread” and there “is little the goods to identify and address repeat offenders” or share information between systems.
In the U.S., organizations are generally not legally required to reveal misconduct when a expected employer calls for a reference, according to Janice Bellace, a professor of task ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Many have a programme of not disclosing why an employee left, partly because of a fear of lawsuits. “There are genuine cases where a person sues for defamation,” she said.
Aid industry watchers say the failure to share information between organizations can perpetuate problems necessitating sexual misconduct.
Christine Williamson, an expert who consults with aid groups on human resources issues, said, “I have seen people change around who have gone through the disciplinary process, come out with a confidentiality understanding, and move on to another organization without really paying the price.”