Story 307

Citigroup New York — ICG Expense Management. My team served as trusted advisors to Global Markets businesses and senior leadership, delivering transparency into execution expense. My male manager fabricated complaints and a false performance review to push me out because my success threatened to expose his lies.

He also called me an arsonist after my apartment fire.

He asked if I had AIDS because I used the word “clinic”.

And after learning that my relationship had ended before I joined his team, he questioned whether I was dedicated to the role and whether I could handle the work. This is the type of person Citi protects.

From the beginning, I was exploited for my femininity — brought into meetings I had no business attending. Senior-level discussions. Projects I wasn’t working on. My manager knew that being the only woman in the room changed the dynamic. People behaved differently, shielding him from the pushback he deserved. He counted on it and openly bragged about this tactic.

For the next four years, I built relationships he couldn’t — through hard work and honesty. I became a trusted advisor to many and quickly the SME. My efforts were a huge part of the team’s success. I was a top performer all four years (I’ve been a top performer my entire career, having tenure at another top investment bank) and was even promoted. All under the same male manager who fabricated my performance review. The same manager who, by that point, had burned nearly every bridge he had and was propped up by the reputation I carried and the relationships I had built.

Things changed dramatically after a reorg gave him broader authority, more than his track record warranted, across multiple processes. He exaggerated functionality to seem important, never thinking he’d get caught. He had made promises and commitments to stakeholders and leadership that he simply could not keep. So, he did what he apparently always did when cornered: he lied. He manipulated GL entries, metrics, and reports to create the appearance that things were functioning, that targets were being met, and that he was delivering. Lying and manipulating the truth wasn’t a last resort for him — it was how he managed.

Now that he controlled every aspect of this process there was no one in his way to challenge his decisions. But I understood the full picture (all of our processes, technology aspect, business needs, etc.) not just individual pieces of it. I knew how he was fooling everyone. I knew how he was engineering the numbers. GL entries were deliberately delayed to make budget and forecast figures appear more accurate than they were (a direct contradiction of his claim that the platform was robust enough to produce reliable figures on its own). I knew how he was carefully wording presentations and metrics, deliberately leaving out important details, to make stakeholders believe requirements were being met.

My presence and the fact that stakeholders would turn to me for updates meant his lies were always one conversation away from being exposed.

I raised concerns. Repeatedly. Our job was to be a conduit. To provide transparency. To serve the businesses and stakeholders that relied on us, not to deceive them. When I made clear I would not purposefully misrepresent the truth, the retaliation began. (I was later written up for this as “not being a team player” and “unprofessional tone”.) I was excluded from meetings I had previously led, assigned junior-level work, stripped of any input, then used as a scapegoat, blamed when things failed.

In contrast, a male colleague who also reported to the same manager actively aided him in his lies and cover-ups. He controlled the GL process, micromanaging every aspect with fear and intimidation. He openly spoke to everyone in a demeaning, unprofessional tone. Not one citation in his performance review. Instead, he was given an office so he could now do this in private.

I made several complaints to HR, about the hostile work environment, the retaliation, the unfair treatment and differing responsibilities between men and women in our group, and my false performance review. When I presented documentation that directly contradicted my review, I was told my manager could have said something verbally that would support his account. When I brought up verbal examples, like the time he called me an arsonist shortly after I had lost half my belongings in an apartment fire and had been displaced without a home for months — I was asked if I had anything in writing or witnesses.

He did eventually apologize, stating, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were so sensitive.”

I was told the only person who could change my review was my manager, and that I needed to work with him directly. When I asked — in fact, pleaded — for HR to be in that meeting, I was told that wasn’t their role. The same person I had just described as a source of fear and intimidation. The same person making my life a living hell. I was told to deal with him on my own. I left feeling hopeless and in complete disbelief.

For the next six months, I lived in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Every email, every meeting, every interaction with my manager was torture. I was terrified that anything and everything would be used against me, right or wrong. I was constantly walking on eggshells while being held to a performance standard that kept shifting. I did everything HR told me to do, but the requests for anything in writing went unanswered. The feedback stayed vague. I was getting nowhere. I was managing my actual workload while simultaneously managing all of this on top of it. It was exhausting beyond measure.

At the next review, HR was present at my manager’s request, he claimed nothing had improved and I was still receiving a poor performance review, still under probation. The performance plan had been made more restrictive, with tighter deadlines and new allegations that simply weren’t true. It was clear he wouldn’t stop until I was fired. I felt I had no other choice but to resign.

What followed my resignation was not a seamless transition. Years of institutional knowledge, relationships, and a performance record that had earned consistent top ratings — none of it transferred the way it should have. Explaining a forced resignation without disclosing the full circumstances is its own kind of trap. The financial impact was significant. The professional impact was lasting. And the personal cost — the toll of spending over a year in a hostile environment, followed by the work of rebuilding everything that was taken from me — is immeasurable. This not only changed the trajectory of my career — it changed my life. I was forced to leave a job that I loved, that I was great at, and that doesn’t open up often.

That manager is still at Citigroup. He has since been promoted. Several times.

Women in finance are routinely described as unable to “hack it” — too emotional, too difficult, not built for high-pressure environments. But in every story like mine, look at who actually couldn’t hack it. It wasn’t the woman. It was the man. The man who couldn’t do his job, so he lied to create the illusion that he could. The man who couldn’t handle the consequences of his actions, so he put the blame on someone else. The man who had to control the narrative and eliminate the competition just to manage the pressure. Unable to hack it looks a lot different when you’re the one manufacturing the evidence.

Citigroup tried to hide behind At-Will Employment — and continues to. But At-Will does not come before an institution’s obligation to protect employees from harassment and hostile work environments. It cannot be used in retaliation and it cannot be used to cover crimes. Which is exactly what my manager was doing. The law is clear. They chose to ignore it.

At no point were my manager’s motives or credibility questioned. Why? Because he was a man and more senior than I was. In Citi’s eyes, that was sufficient criteria for telling the truth.

Despite these obvious red flags:

• Performance rating dropped drastically from previous years — all under the same manager.

• Vague criticisms that didn’t match past feedback.

• Zero documentation to back up negative claims.

• Goals shifted mid-cycle to set me up to fail.

• Zero feedback.

This should have been the first of many clues that my manager was exploiting his power. It should have raised an even bigger question, one HR never bothered to ask: why would a manager suddenly want to get rid of a top performing member of his team?

A basic investigation verifying the source behind the complaints in my review would have shown that they were fabricated, and put into question the credibility of his claims. That step was never taken. That is not an oversight. This was a choice. The message is clear: this behavior is not merely tolerated. It is protected.

HR’s “thorough investigation” into my complaints about my manager was led and choreographed by my manager. A sense check of a report and validating some calculations. There was no looking into the raw data. No trying to recreate the report on their own. No deep dive into GL entries. No research into delayed payments. No meeting with stakeholders. They just went through the motions so they could create a paper trail and close the case.

Which raises a question that goes beyond my story: at what point do proper authorities get involved?

HR is not a neutral party. It represents the company. Its interests, its liability, its leadership. The conflict of interest is not incidental. It is structural. And CEOs, however well-intentioned, are equally compromised. Too close to the institution, too invested in its reputation, too surrounded by the very culture they would need to dismantle.

Financial institutions operate under some of the most rigorous regulatory frameworks in existence. There are policies and procedures governing how money moves, how risk is reported, how clients are treated. Outside entities exist precisely to ensure those standards are enforced. Why should the fair treatment of employees — in this case, women — be any different? Why are these companies allowed to be judge and jury?

In every other domain that touches this industry, governance means outside oversight. Impartial. Independent. Accountable to something larger than the bottom line. The people inside these institutions who abuse their power and the institutions that protect them are currently operating without that check. And they know it. Until there are real consequences — not internal reviews, not mandatory trainings, not carefully worded statements about company values — this behavior will continue.

One last thing ….

At the time, I wasn’t sure what a couple of other male colleagues knew or understood about the situation between myself and my manager. We’d always had a strong working relationship, as counterparts and project partners. My contributions and abilities were evident. But being removed and isolated from the team creates a kind of awkwardness … and maybe they just didn’t want to get involved out of fear for their own jobs.

As I mentioned before, the work we did is specialized; this is not a role that opens up often. And in the years since, when opportunities for this role have opened, at different companies, on these colleagues’ teams, I’ve been met with stonewalling and what feels a lot like being blacklisted. There is no professional reason for this, unless they believed my manager’s lies or benefitted from his actions.

It takes a callous, weak, cold, immoral human being to steal someone’s livelihood for personal gain. But it takes an entire system of people looking the other way to let it happen. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. It’s that simple.