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Ousted Recording Academy CEO goes nuclear in legal filing alleging sexual harassment, rape claims, corruption, misogyny and vote fixing
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 22 January 2020
Deborah Dugan, the ousted CEO of Grammy organiser the US Recording Academy, yesterday filed formal legal proceedings against her employer with the LA office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The 46 page document contains a long list of serious allegations against the Academy, its board, its governance, its attorneys and its former boss, as well as revelations about the process by which artists are nominated for Grammy Awards. If only half of Dugan’s allegations are true, it could seriously jeopardise the future of the music industry organisation and its annual awards event.
The legal filing is the latest in the back and forth of statements between Dugan and the Recording Academy, which began last week with the latter announcing that it had put the former on “administrative leave”. In that announcement, the Academy claimed that it had sidelined its CEO following allegations of misconduct by another senior female member of staff.
Dugan’s lawyer quickly hit back by insisting that “what has been reported is not nearly the story that needs to be told”, while promising that his client would “expose what happens when you ‘step up’ at the Recording Academy”. That ‘step up’ remark referenced, of course, the controversial comments made by Dugan’s predecessor Neil Portnow when responding to the lack of gender diversity at the 2018 Grammy Awards.
Following the statement from Dugan’s lawyer, reports circulated that her “administrative leave” actually followed an email that she had sent to a senior colleague late last year outlining various concerns about the governance of the Academy, including allegations of corruption regarding expenditure and the Grammys voting process. The implication was that Dugan was being pushed out by the Academy’s board and executive committee because they didn’t want the corruption to be exposed or dealt with.
The current Chair of the Academy’s board, Harvey Mason Jr, then responded via an open letter. He admitted that Dugan had raised various concerns about the organisation late last year and that said concerns were being investigated. But, he argued, the CEO only raised those concerns once she knew that the board was formally looking into the allegations of misconduct that had been made against her. Those allegations, he said, included that Dugan had been ‘abusive and bullying’ in relation to a colleague.
For good measure, Mason said that Dugan had offered to go quietly, and to not cause any fuss about the issues she had raised, if the Academy paid her millions of dollars. Although Dugan’s letter wasn’t specific on how many millions, a source at the Academy seemingly started telling media and industry contacts that it was $22 million.
Which brings us to Dugan’s legal filing. Her document contains so many serious allegations, it’s hard to know where to start.
It begins with a brief history of all the times the Recording Academy and its Grammy Awards have been criticised for a lack of diversity, up to and including Portnow’s controversial remarks in 2018. It then outlines how the organisation set up a diversity taskforce in the wake of that controversy, and also explains how Dugan was head-hunted to become the Academy’s first female CEO.
The filing stresses that Dugan was initially reluctant to leave her previous job and relocate to LA, but that she ultimately decided to rise to the challenge of helping an organisation rife with diversity issues to address those problems.
Then the allegations begin, which include all of the following…
1. That the Academy’s board has approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to themselves for work that was “either unnecessary or that was already being performed by outside vendors”.
2. That the Academy pays ridiculous legal fees each year to two lawyers who have close links to members of the board.
3. That one of those lawyers, Joel Katz, took Dugan out to dinner before she’d even formally started to work for the Academy, that he made numerous sexist remarks, and suggested they should “spend time together” visiting his many homes, even after she made it clear she wasn’t interested in a relationship of that kind.
4. That the Academy’s board urged her to re-hire her predecessor Portnow on a $750,000 consultancy before subsequently revealing that he had been accused of rape by a female artist – an allegation that had been covered up and which, Dugan says, “was, upon information and belief, the real reason his contract was not renewed”.
5. That Dugan wasn’t invited to a presentation of the findings of the diversity taskforce and that, when she showed up anyway, one board member’s reaction to said presentation was “this is bullshit”.
6. That despite supposedly hiring Dugan to deal with the Academy’s very public diversity issues, the board and executive committee rejected most of her proposed solutions to the problem, keen to keep the “boy’s club” culture they themselves benefited from.
7. That the “senior female member of staff” who made a complaint against Dugan was, in fact, Portnow’s former Executive Assistant Claudine Little, who the new CEO reckoned wasn’t qualified to do the job.
8. That Little’s complaints had been blown out of all proportion by the board who saw it as an opportunity to sideline Dugan (and possibly encouraged Little to escalate her complaint to help with that process).
9. That, having rejected Dugan’s reforms, in December the board started removing many of the powers usually associated with a CEO role.
10. That when she asked the aforementioned Katz about those new restrictions, he told her to “ignore them”, adding that he could get her some free dresses – so that she could “look pretty” at Academy events – if she made department store chain Neiman Marcus, one of his clients, a Grammy sponsor.
11. That, after Dugan decided to take her dispute legal at the end of 2019, the board initially looked like it would agree a settlement deal, then back-tracked, and then gave her an alternative deal and one hour to accept it.
12. That emails from Mason made it clear that she was being put on administrative leave because of the allegations she’d made and the subsequent threat of legal action, but then the Academy issued a statement saying it was because of Little’s allegations of bullying.
13. That Mason told Dugan that the Academy would simply announce that she was taking “a leave of absence”, but then issued the statement saying she was on “administrative leave” because of the bullying claims.
14. That Mason’s open letter this week was only published because the Academy new Dugan was about to go legal, and its claims regarding her departure (and the accompanying $22 million pay-off rumour) were “false, retaliatory and defamatory”.
15. That Mason is currently on “a mission to further destroy Ms Dugan and has been calling prominent recording artists non-stop to disparage and defame Ms Dugan”.
16. That the “damage that the Academy has done to Ms Dugan is immeasurable and can never be remedied … [it is also] continuing in nature”.
17. That Dugan isn’t the first female executive at the Recording Academy to be treated this way, with a former Chief Information Officer having told Dugan after she took the CEO job that “if you open your mouth, you’re gone”
18. That the previous mistreatment of female execs included the sidelining of the Academy’s then head of communications in the wake of Portnow’s “step-up” remarks, mainly so an all-male committee could respond to the resulting controversy.
19. And, for good measure, that the Grammy nominations process is shrouded in secrecy and definitely corrupt, with nominating committees able to ignore the results of the 12,000 member votes and instead favour their own clients and associates.
20. In fact, artists can sit on the nominating committees for awards for which they are eligible – resulting in one artist, in eighteenth place after member voting, getting on the final shortlist for Song Of The Year and, in doing so, depriving Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande of a possible nomination.
As you can see, Dugan’s legal filing is an explosive document, neatly delivered just as the American music community – and artists and industry execs from all over the world – head to LA for this weekend’s Grammy festivities.
For its part, the Recording Academy is standing its ground, continuing to insist that Dugan’s formal grievances were a response to the bullying claims. And again accusing its pushed out CEO of trying to get millions of dollars – and this time it goes official with the $22 million figure – out of the Academy in return for going quietly.
It said in a statement: “It is curious that Ms Dugan never raised these grave allegations until a week after legal claims were made against her personally by a female employee who alleged Ms Dugan had created a ‘toxic and intolerable’ work environment and engaged in ‘abusive and bullying conduct’. When Ms Dugan did raise her ‘concerns’ to HR, she specifically instructed HR ‘not to take any action’ in response”.
“Nonetheless, we immediately launched independent investigations to review both Ms Dugan’s potential misconduct and her subsequent allegations”, it goes on. “Both of these investigations remain ongoing. Ms Dugan was placed on administrative leave only after offering to step down and demanding $22 million from the Academy, which is a not-for-profit organisation”.
The statement concludes: “Our loyalty will always be to the 25,000 members of the recording industry. We regret that music’s biggest night is being stolen from them by Ms Dugan’s actions and we are working to resolve the matter as quickly as possible”.
Whatever Mason et al are doing to resolve these matters, it seems unlikely the fallout of Dugan’s departure is going to be dealt with anytime soon. And while it’s true that we are still in the midst of a “she said, he said” back and forth at the moment, you do sense that the recording industry the Academy represents could be about to turn against the organisation. One thing is for certain, it will be a particularly interesting Grammy Weekend.
