This week, allegations surfaced of sexual assault and multiple incidents of gender-based harassment at Kansas City’s Boulevard Brewing Company, prompting the company to issue a statement and subsequent apology. Boulevard’s president, Jeff Krum, resigned Wednesday, saying he failed to ensure that “workplaces were free of any form of real or perceived harassment or demonstrations of unwanted attention.” Krum also resigned as president of Boulevard’s parent company, Duvel USA. The company says he retains no stock options and received no retirement package. The brewery’s vice president of marketing, Natalie Gershon, also publicly resigned Wednesday, stating that she did not agree with company decisions surrounding the allegations. She did not detail future plans.
A statement posted to Reddit on Wednesday and attributed to employees across multiple departments at Boulevard cites “a toxic culture and harmful work environment created and cultivated by certain members of our executive team.” It concludes with a promise that employees will “insist on and accept nothing less than maintaining a brewery culture where employees are heard, misconduct is not tolerated or brushed aside, and we return to operating in the best interest of ALL Boulevardians, not just those at the top of the food chain.”
As allegations unfurled, once-private pain came under a national spotlight. Once-nameless stories developed human faces. At least one woman, Hannah McEldowney, came forward publicly to say she’d been assaulted by a long-standing Boulevard employee. The men at the center of the allegations for now remain publicly unnamed.
Amid the turmoil, Boulevard’s digital marketing director, Pat Mullin, implored the public in a tweet to consider that “behind almost every company crisis or controversy are a lot of innocent people within who are hurting, frustrated, trying their best to do right and just LIVE. Remember those people.” Is it not also critical to remember the women who have come forward—as well as those who haven’t? It’s worth reflecting on who becomes the center of these controversies, who is able to avoid the spotlight, and whose voices are left out of public conversation.
Yet again, the beer industry continues to grapple, as it has for years, with a failure to protect vulnerable employees. An industry that touts its camaraderie is yet again confronted with a betrayal of trust, a breach of safety. Another woman is faced with the choice to remain quiet, or to come forward with the truth in order to strengthen other women’s stories.
Once McEldowney felt compelled to speak publicly, she was largely met with messages of support on social media. People have rightly praised her fortitude and courage, and have left her messages of sympathy and solidarity. “I believe you. Thank you for being so courageous and coming forward,” a typical Instagram comment reads.
The same public support followed those who went public with stories of abuse and racism at North Carolina’s Brewery Bhavana and its sibling restaurant Bida Manda last year.
It followed Natalie Philips, who in 2019 accused Fred Lee, founder of Ohio’s Actual Brewing, of rape.
It followed the four women beer professionals from Montana, Arizona, and Georgia who last year shared stories of mistreatment ranging from stalking to sexual abuse.
It followed women beer professionals from across the country who, in 2018, shared with writer Jeff Alworth examples of harassment and intimidation.
Such stories are unfortunately common in breweries, taprooms, and the larger hospitality industry. More than 60% of restaurant workers in the U.S. report experiencing sexual violence on the job. Women who work in a male-dominated industry like brewing may be more vulnerable than their peers in other industries: In a 2017 Pew Research survey, 28% of women who work mostly with men stated they had personally experienced sexual harassment at work, compared to 21% of women in gender-equal workplaces.
Collectively, the beer industry has applauded whistleblowers who come forward with stories of abuse and harassment. Yet what has it materially done to make it easier for them to come forward?
Speaking up isn’t rewarded with job security, or even personal safety. Women in the industry are led to believe that things are better now, at least better than “the old days” when sexual harassment and discrimination went largely unchecked. Are things better? There is undoubtedly greater consensus among men and women alike that such behavior is intolerable. Yet solidarity doesn’t necessarily translate to a job offer, or to protection from one’s abuser. Material conditions and financial realities remain a barrier to calling out abuse and bad behavior.
Often, to remain employed in the industry and continue to make a living, survivors have to continue to interact with people who were complicit in their abuse, or with their abusers. Sarah Swenson, a sales and brand manager in Arizona, described to Stephanie Grant for CraftBeer.com her experience of being forced to interact at beer events with a colleague who had sexually assaulted her.
“He would make it a point ... to sit down right next to me and act like we were best friends. He knew that if he would start a conversation in front of my bosses, that I would be professional and tolerate it,” Swenson said in the piece.
At Boulevard, too, women say they were expected to tolerate abusive behavior or risk their livelihoods.
“I was too afraid, I didn’t want to lose my job,” McEldowney wrote in her statement, explaining why she didn’t file for a restraining order against her abuser. “I needed my job. It’s a terrible spot to be in, to choose paying bills over being safe.”
That’s a bleak choice, one with life-changing consequences at either side. Employees in the brewing industry cannot be fully safe until it is eliminated. Otherwise, what conclusions are other survivors in the beer industry to draw from the experiences of people who have spoken up before them?
McEldowney chose to speak publicly, at great personal and professional peril. Even before she came forward, she writes that the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from her workplace abuse made it difficult for her to do her job.
Anyone else in beer who is considering options like that—staying silent or staying employed—finds that choice is made more difficult by the economic precarity wrought by COVID-19. Now is a difficult time to be an unemployed person, especially one in a hospitality- or tourism-dependent industry that’s struggling during the pandemic. The U.S. Travel Association reported in December that 35% of all job losses during the pandemic came from the hospitality and leisure industry. If you leave your job because of gender-based harassment, it’s likely there’s no safety net waiting to catch you.
Some in the industry who leave their jobs for such reasons also find themselves economically pressured into signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), a sentiment sources expressed to GBH in the wake of the Boulevard news. (GBH is withholding their names because these sources continue to work in the industry.) In the brewing industry, NDAs and non-competes are billed as protecting a brewery’s recipes and other practices, but they can have the added effect of preventing former employees from speaking out about negative experiences at that brewery.
Again, employees may face a binary choice: sign and remain silent, or leave without any money to replace lost wages. Regardless of the industry or specific scenario, economic pressure is a factor in keeping survivors silent. It’s only logical that fearing a loss of income would encourage someone to remain in a harmful situation. Former employees of Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana said that because they made better money at Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana than they would have at other restaurants, they were reluctant to quit.
The risk of losing one’s career looms large in potential whistleblowers’ minds. Until speaking up comes with economic safeguards, that’s unlikely to change. As Lecia Imbery, senior policy writer for the Coalition on Human Needs puts it, “Low-income women are often trapped in abusive situations by a lack of financial resources.” Low-income or not, employees’ safety is not served by financial incentives that encourage silence.
Beyond economic pressures, there are other mechanisms by which survivors are discouraged from coming forward. Chief among them is the potential trauma associated with subjecting their story to public scrutiny. As McEldowney wrote in her statement, she never planned to publicly come forward about her experience at Boulevard, but felt compelled to after someone else shared details of her story publicly without her prior knowledge or consent.
Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and the way the sun shines in craft beer is generally through the media. The media is crucial in exposing allegations of sexism and racism, and holding parties to account. Bad actors often face punishment in the court of public opinion, if not in the legal system. But reputable publications are ethically averse to printing anonymous allegations of abuse or misconduct. To publish a story, the media needs a complaining witness.
[Good Beer Hunting is mindful of its duty to both report accurately and to avoid harming sources who come forward to share their stories. These tensions are a topic of ongoing discussion within the editorial team. As part of that, GBH consults with Healing to Action, an organization dedicated to ending gender-based violence, in order to weigh these scenarios safely.]
So these are survivors’ options: Share your name and allow your trauma to be interrogated, or bad actors won’t face public scrutiny. Open yourself to possible retaliation and professional ruin, or a company won’t have to reckon with its failures. Public support is contingent on survivors sharing details that make their experience valid and believable. But the very process required for the public to believe survivors is often, itself, damaging.
Groups like the Dart Center are doing important work in training the media on how to approach this type of reporting, but the potential to retraumatize survivors remains. An analysis of news coverage of sexual violence between 2011-2013, conducted by the Berkeley Media Studies Group, found that coverage of sexual violence “tends to lack clear and coherent descriptions of rape and sexual abuse, or uses language that implies consent and minimizes the violence and violation of the acts described.” This doesn’t just have public policy implications, but risks harming the survivor whose story was framed in a way that doesn’t feel true to them.
As a reporter, I struggle with my duty to ask questions of survivors. It’s a journalistic necessity, but it runs the risk of retraumatizing a person. My need to verify facts is counter to survivors’ need to be believed, to have their abuse validated. Even asking them to repeat the who, what, when, where of their experiences runs the risk of doing psychic damage. Trying to identify the why of it all—if there even is one—feels ethically impossible, and potentially harmful. That’s because people who have experienced abuse are often made to feel it’s their fault or that they are misreading the facts, often termed “gaslighting.”
Additionally, trauma—which can result from abuse or intimidation—has been shown to “fragment the sequence of events” in survivors’ memories, according to The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. People who have experienced sexual assault may be unable to recall the date or location of the event, while other details of it remain clear in their memories. To tell and retell such stories—to police, to coworkers, to a human resources department, to journalists and the public—is stressful. And yet that retelling is the only avenue most survivors have to hold responsible parties accountable.
These challenges aren’t unique to those experiencing abuse within the brewing sphere; they span industries. And like other industries, beer has committed itself to doing better. Applauding whistleblowers for coming forward is a start. Reducing the barriers they have to doing so is a next step.
Words by Kate Bernot