Lionesses who help you tell your tale
P.R. executives find their niche assisting mistreated employees
The last thing Debbie Kosta wanted was to talk to a reporter. The past year had already upended her life, with the coronavirus putting her in a coma for nearly a month. When she tried to ease back into her job in sales at Robbins Research International, run by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, she found that the company had locked her out.
Providing the details of what had happened to a lawyer in the discrimination suit she filed was terrifying enough, she said. She didn’t want to do it again with a journalist.
But as Robbins’ lawyers fought her claims, which a spokeswoman for him has called “ridiculous and baseless,” Kosta was concerned that she would be outmatched by power and money. Her lawyer suggested that she employ another asset: telling people her story. He connected her with Ariella Steinhorn and Amber Scorah, public-relations executives whose firm, Lioness, had carved out a specialty helping people navigate the process of speaking
out against workplace mistreatment.
Steinhorn assured Kosta that she was not alone and that her story should be heard. “She wanted to hear my heart,” Kosta said, “not just what happened.”
The two helped arrange a story about Kosta’s situation in The Verge. It was picked up by Insider, NBC, The New York Times and other news outlets. The outpouring of support from people who read the coverage and were in similar situations provided Kosta with a measure of validation after her harrowing year.
“I was thinking maybe it was just me,” she said. Everyone else, she said, was like, “‘No, no, no.’”
In the whisper networks of corporate America, people pass around the names of colleagues to avoid — sexists, racists, creeps, toxic bosses. But lately, they’ve also been passing around the names of Steinhorn and Scorah.
“We think of ourselves as an intake and conduit for them to know how to tell their story,” Scorah said. “That doesn’t come naturally to everyone.”
When an individual contacts Lioness, the two typically vet and corroborate the story, identifying which parts would be of interest to the news media. They work with a law firm that reviews nondisclosure agreements for free. They then make connections to reporters, explaining how talking to the news media works, checking facts and following up.
It’s the kind of behind-thescenes guidance on which executives rely. Steinhorn and Scorah are, essentially, midwifing stories of discrimination, harassment, fraud and mistreatment into the world.
Steinhorn said she thinks storytelling is a powerful tool in the fight for justice. “We’ve noticed that stories change hearts,” she said. “It’s much more effective than the legal case, in a way.”
Since starting in late 2019, Lioness has worked with more than 100 individuals and arranged around a dozen stories, including one in Fortune about racism at the startup Glossier, one in Business Insider about kids gambling on video game platforms and one in Forbes about the toxic culture at the startup Better.com.
The firm’s services are free for people speaking out, which Lioness supports by doing paid PR work for nonprofits and companies.
One key element of Lioness’ work is preparing people for what might happen after they go public. Many don’t fully understand the kind of backlash they can get when they speak out online, Steinhorn said.
There’s also a chance of legal action from companies over nondisclosure or nondisparagement agreements.
But the two said the momentum behind #Metoo, Black Lives Matter and today’s labor movements has made people feel more empowered to risk their jobs and reputations to push for change.
The pandemic has further motivated people to call out injustices, Steinhorn said. “People are suddenly willing to take huge personal risks to topple power structures.”
Scorah saw the need for an agency such as Lioness in 2015, after her infant son, Karl, died on his first day at day care. In her grief, she sought out people with similar stories and connected their experiences to the country’s lack of paid leave for new parents. She wrote an article that vividly described her experience and advocated better policies. Her lawyer advised against publishing it, she said.
The story went viral after it was published in the Times, sparking a national conversation around the issue of paid leave, and Scorah found herself at the center of a news-media frenzy after a personal tragedy. It wasn’t easy, and she said she could have used help navigating the attention.
Steinhorn had worked in public relations at Uber and other startups, witnessing misrepresentations and bad behaviors that she said were kept out of the public with secret settlements. It got her interested in employment law, with a desire to expand the resources available to workers.
“I heard so many stories, and many of those stories were signed away,” she said. “Some people never wanted to talk about them again, but others did and had this gnawing feeling.’”
The two women formed Lioness in 2019 after Scorah responded to an ad that Steinhorn posted on Linkedin. The first story they worked on was a Forbes investigation that outlined claims of fraud, founder infighting and toxic executive behavior at Better.com, a $4 billion mortgage startup that Linkedin named its top startup of 2020. Lioness connected the Forbes reporters with many of the 19 current and former employees interviewed in the story, who anonymously shared background information and documents.
People who worked with Lioness said they wouldn’t have participated without the firm’s guidance. Lawyers and reporters aggressively stress-test every detail of the situation with probing questions. Steinhorn helped the workers get comfortable with the situation and focus on the most relevant parts of their stories.
As word of Lioness spread, particularly around Steinhorn’s network of tech workers, almost all of the firm’s incoming clients had the same concern: Would they be sued for breaking their nondisclosure agreements? Such agreements were created by companies to protect valuable trade secrets, but they’re also wielded as tools to keep employees from talking publicly about bad experiences at work. Nondisclosure or nondisparagement agreements are most commonly applied in secret settlements after an employee has reported harassment, assault or discrimination.
To help people navigate the legal risks, Steinhorn created a partnership with Vincent White, a lawyer focused on workplace harassment.
White said Lioness has brought him enough agreements “to keep eight lawyers busy.” He does an initial review free; roughly 10% of those who interview end up pursuing a case with his firm.
Generally, White said, the businesses involved know it will reflect badly on them to sue employees who speak up about poor treatment.
And there is some legal protection for people who claim sexual misconduct in New York and California, thanks to laws passed in the wake of the #Metoo movement.
In California, a bill proposed for the first time this year, called the Silenced No More Act, would extend that to include all forms of discrimination and harassment. It was spearheaded in part by Ifeoma Ozoma, a Pinterest employee who broke her nondisclosure agreement to speak out about gender and racial discrimination she experienced at the company.
White said that, alongside the new laws, companies have made their nondisclosure agreements stricter and more complicated in recent years.