The president of a top liberal think tank disclosed the name of a sexual harassment victim during a meeting with staff on the issue, just days after a report was published about it.
The Wednesday meeting was intended to instill trust in CAP’s management of sexual harassment cases after Buzzfeed reported Monday a woman referred to as Mary reported to the organization in 2016 her team manager, Benton Strong, sent her multiple sexually explicit text messages.
Tanden then revealed Mary’s identity at the meeting.
“There is literally one thing you cannot do in this meeting and that is out the victim and Neera did it multiple times … It also destroys whatever small level of confidence in the system remained,” a CAP employee who was present at the meeting wrote in a text to BuzzFeed News. “As a manager I don’t know how I can tell staff to trust the system when the head of the organization just outed the victim in front of the entire organization. It is impossible to trust her.”
“Neera lost the organization today,” another CAP employee told BuzzFeed. “There was so much angst in that room. She outed the victim, and the subtext of every question was a lack of confidence in her leadership and the ability to create trust within the organization.”
A spokesperson for CAP told Buzzfeed Tanden “unintentionally said the complaintant’s first name in the meeting today, and immediately and profusely apologized for it.”
“She feels awful that it happened and that the victim’s negative experience was compounded; she also expressed that the victim’s actions in coming forward were courageous,” the spokesperson added. “Neera’s horror was very evident in the meeting.”
A recording of the meeting obtained by Buzzfeed shows Tanden referenced Mary’s identity twice as she responded to a question about the retaliation Mary faced for reporting the sexual harassment to the human resources department.
According to Buzzfeed, Mary had not granted permission for her identity to be revealed and said Tanden and other managers at CAP had not reached out to her since BuzzFeed started contacting CAP for the story earlier this month.
BuzzFeed noted that after this detail was included in social media posts, Tanden contacted Mary on Wednesday evening to apologize.
At the meeting were staff members from CAP and its sister organization CAP Action, in addition to ThinkProgress, a news organization branch of CAP Action.
The Center for American Progress was launched in 2003 by former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
