AP Photo/Kathy Kmonicek
- Multiple Mets employees filed allegations of sexual harassment, a report from The Athletic revealed.
- The employees allege that the organization's management did not sufficiently act on the complaints.
- Team president Sandy Alderson defended the organization's actions in statements to The Athletic.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Multiple employees within The New York Mets organization filed allegations of sexual harassment with human resources, according to a damning new report from Katie Strang and Brittany Ghiroli of The Athletic. The employees say the team did not sufficiently act on those complaints.
More than a dozen employees, male and female, told The Athletic that the Mets' senior vice president of human resources and diversity, Holly Lindvall, was made aware of allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct. But they said they didn't see Linvall take disciplinary action.
"It was clear that her interest was protecting ownership and executives and not the office as a whole," one former Mets employee told The Athletic. "You could not go to HR to feel protected, comfortable, anything."
The report indicates that the complaints most often involved the team's chief marketing, content, and communications officer, David Newman, as well as former marketing staffer Joe DeVito. The allegations against Newman suggest that he made inappropriate comments about women's appearances during his 13-year stint with the team from 2005 to 2018. Newman stepped down in 2018 then got rehired last year.
The allegations involving DeVito, meanwhile, suggested he sent inappropriate text messages to women and also gave one woman an unsolicited back rub.
Mets employees further alleged in The Athletics's report that former owner Jeff Wilpon and former manager Mickey Callaway made sexist comments, too.
Team president Sandy Alderson defended the organization's handling of the complaints to The Athletic.
"Not every instance involving men, women in the workplace is a capital offense, OK? Every time something happens, it doesn't mean somebody has to be fired," Alderson told Strang and Ghiroli. "There are a lot of intermediate steps that can be taken, and we've done that in a variety of different cases. And have included capital punishment as a consequence in some cases, but not every case rises to the level of execution. And that's what honestly I think is happening with these articles."
Lindvall also defended the team's process for responding to and investigating complaints.
"We have always had a strict policy prohibiting workplace harassment and discrimination and have thoroughly and objectively investigated any and all complaints that were brought to our attention," Lindvall wrote in an email to The Athletic. "Where our investigation confirmed that misconduct occurred, we have always taken swift and appropriate action to remedy it."
The Mets did not respond to Insider's request for comment ahead of publication.
The Athletic's report is the second investigation related to sexual harassment to engulf the Mets in recent months.
In January, ESPN reported that Jared Porter, the team's general manager at the time, had acknowledged sending explicit photos to a female reporter when he was with the Chicago Cubs. The Mets subsequently fired Porter.
The Mets are now owned by Steve Cohen, a hedge fund manager who purchased the team from Wilpon for $2.6 billion in November. Cohen announced in March that he had hired a law firm to investigate the Mets' workplace culture, focusing on sexual harassment, misconduct, and discrimination issues.