Bloomberg willing to release 3 women from their nondisclosure agreements

LAS VEGAS >> Michael Bloomberg said Friday that he was willing to release three women from nondisclosure agreements with his company so they could discuss their complaints about him publicly — reversing himself after he resisted doing so under fire from his rivals at this week’s Democratic presidential debate.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, Bloomberg, who is also the former mayor of New York, said officials at Bloomberg LP had identified three nondisclosure agreements made with women related to “complaints about comments they said I had made.”

“If any of them want to be released from their NDA so that they can talk about those allegations, they should contact the company and they’ll be given a release,” Bloomberg said in the statement. “I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this issue over the past few days and I’ve decided that for as long as I’m running the company, we won’t offer confidentiality agreements to resolve claims of sexual harassment or misconduct going forward.”

But the carefully worded statement by Bloomberg appeared that it would not release all former employees from such agreements. For instance, it did not say he would release former employees who signed nondisclosure agreements after complaining of harassment from any person other than Bloomberg.

The statement comes after Bloomberg faced withering criticism from Democratic rivals in the debate on Wednesday, most notably from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Vice President Joe Biden.

“We need to know exactly what’s lurking out there,” Warren said at the debate in Las Vegas. “He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace.”

The harsh questioning seemed to fluster the mayor, whose debate performance was largely panned, and top aides took responsibility for poorly preparing the candidate.

“None of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” Bloomberg said at the debate. “There’s agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet and that’s up to them. They signed those agreements, and we’ll live with it.”

But Warren continued to criticize the mayor this week, including during a CNN town hall program on Thursday. Warren, who used to teach contract law, presented a “release and covenant not to sue” document that she said would free the people bound by the nondisclosure agreements to speak.