The leader who wasn’t one
I was hired by a Managing Director in [REDACTED] who later claimed, when challenged about the discrimination, bullying and retaliation she and her junior director engaged in, that she didn’t know my resume.
Consider what that claim requires you to believe. She was building a team and pulling people into her group, yet supposedly knew nothing about them. I came to her from another MD, someone she had a close personal connection with, and the two of them had discussed what my focus should be in 2024. She knew enough about me to plan my work, but later told Employee Relations she didn’t know me.
She scheduled 1:1s with everyone except a few people: the most senior and experienced ones, people she later claimed not to know. Shortly before performance reviews, I emailed her a detailed recap of my contributions. She never scheduled a conversation about it. She forwarded it to her junior director, and my work was then claimed by him while my role was narrowed further.
What followed was my unlawful layoff, after a year of relentless undermining and sabotage, public and private humiliation, retaliation for setting boundaries, and retaliation for taking legal action when every attempt to be heard internally was shut down.
She has since blocked me on social media, perhaps hoping to deny ever knowing me, or to limit exposure to her network before any backlash came.
What she didn’t anticipate was a platform like this one, where people can describe what Citi management looks like from the inside: a network a network that protects its own and works to silence concerns rather than address them.
This isn’t the story of one person. Three of us were systematically pushed out by this leader at the same time. More cases have surfaced and her track record has since come to light with her own leadership.