UNDER FIRE
In new report on workplace sexual harassment
executive under Newman, quit the team in March amid allegations of sexual harassment. According to The Athletic, women said that he gave an unwanted back rub at spring training and sent multiple women text messages that made them uncomfortable. One of those texts reads “At least I am not as creepy as Mickey.”
Ryan Ellis, who rose to minor league hitting coordinator under Alderson, was fired after the Porter allegations. Three women had gone to Mets HR in 2018 saying that Ellis sexually harassed them, but the Mets waited until February 2021 to fire him.
Alderson, who was the Mets GM from 2010-18 and rehired by new owner Steve Cohen as team president late last year, thinks this is all old news.
“Is there ever a statute of limitations on coverage of some of this stuff?” he whined to The Athletic.
Newman, whose first stint with the organization ran from 2005 until 2018, reportedly complained about how women looked, including claiming that one staffer’s bright lipstick made her lips look “too wet” and relentlessly criticizing another’s hair as “unruly.”
He told The Athletic that he had “no recollection of this whatsoever.”
In the Leigh Castergine sexual discrimination lawsuit that the team settled in 2015, Newman was anonymously quoted as saying another Mets employee “hasn’t been the same since she had children.”
The basis of Castergine’s lawsuit was that former owner Jeff Wilpon had bullied her over her own pregnancy. Newman denied making the comment, although two Mets employees told The Athletic that they heard him say it.
Newman’s punishment? Alderson promised the women who warned him about Newman that he’d make him “knock it off.” He was hired the same day.
Cohen, who handpicked Alderson to run the team after he bought it from the Wilpons, hired a law firm to review the Mets’ workplace harassment and abuse problem. Cohen had hired the same law firm to review the same problem at his hedge fund, Point72, after a woman sued for sexual discrimination. That lawsuit was settled weeks before Cohen’s purchase of the Mets closed.
Several Mets employees told The Athletic that human resources under vice president Holly Lindvall worked for the best interests of the Wilpons and their management.
“It was clear that her interest was protecting ownership and executives and not the office as a whole,” one employee said. “You could not go to HR to feel protected, comfortable, anything.”
Lindvall has worked for the Mets since 2013.
Castergine claimed in her that lawsuit Lindvall told her to quit when she reported Jeff Wilpon’s behavior, which included criticizing Castergine for having a child while unmarried.