I Don’t Accept This Apology

I don’t believe that one starts an apology with the sentence “The past 24 hours have been the darkest of my life.” In my world, the apology is to another person. It’s not a tone setting exercise, or a plea for sympathy, for the one making the apology.

I was fuming after seeing the public apology on Axios from Justin Caldbeck. I could be wrong, but it felt like it was written by a crisis management PR firm. I spent most of Friday evening angry and upset. Embarrassed by the behavior of some men. Proud of the women who broke their silence about the abuse they had been on the receiving end of. But mostly just ashamed of myself for not doing more about the issue of sexual harassment in our industry.

I read Reid Hoffman’s The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs and Joanne Wilson’s The Gig Is Up. My partners and I had an extensive conversation over the weekend. Amy and I talked about it over dinner Friday and Saturday night.

And then I read Brenden Mulligan’s Everything I hate about Justin Caldbeck’s statement. I nodded my head all the way through. I knew what I was feeling, which was what Brenden was articulating. His post is an angry one, which he acknowledges, and the fierceness of it makes the point even more powerful.

It takes a lot to get me angry. I continued to stew all day Saturday. I thought about this during my entire run. I tried to process what I wanted to do and how I wanted to respond. Every time I thought about my anger, I reminded myself that this wasn’t about me. I knew that a quick response, driven by my own anger, wasn’t healthy. So I kept talking to my partners and to Amy.

Clarity of thought for me finally came together on my run Sunday. After lunch and a shower, my partners and I co-wrote the post Our Zero Tolerance Policy On Sexual Harassment which appears on our Foundry Group website.

I hope I, and my partners at Foundry Group, am viewed as a safe place for anyone in our industry. Specifically, if anyone ever feels sexual harassed in any context, I offer myself up as a resource for them to try to be a source of good in the universe.

And, a hint for anyone who wants to apologize for anything. The way to do it, as I learned from my mother, is to say, simply, “Joan, I’m sorry.”

Originally published at Feld Thoughts.

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