“I thought, ‘If I’m sexually harassed, they’re not going to care.' ... Shit like that happens all the time here.”
at the company. That was followed in June by a group of SpaceX employees releasing a statement saying Musk’s frattish behavior was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” and asking Musk to stop being, well, a creep. SpaceX investigated their complaints for 24 hours, and then announced that SpaceX had “terminated a number of employees involved.”
Musk became the richest man in the world and continued his frat-boy-as-businessman strategy. He announced in July 2020 the sale of a limited number of red satin short-shorts with the word S3XY written across the ass, ostensibly tweaking Tesla short sellers who lost billions as the stock rose. “Only $69.420,” tweeted Musk. They sold out in minutes.
“I just thought it was very weird,” Blickman tells me. We are sitting in the deserted pool area of her apartment complex. It’s June, but she’s in a puffer jacket and occasionally shivers. I wonder whether it was because of the morning chill or talking about her experiences working at Tesla. In Blickman’s case, she claims, problems started at her onboarding session. She recalls the man in the S3XY T-shirt starting to read in a monotone about Tesla’s various policies. Eventually, he came to the company’s policy on sexual harassment. According to Blickman, he played an instructional video. Many of the examples in the video were of women harassing men. She couldn’t believe it.
Blickman began commuting with another worker, Jessica Brooks, one of the seven women who have filed suit against Tesla, who claims she eventually began piling boxes around her workstation so Tesla workers couldn’t gawk at her body, and confirms Blickman’s story. Brooks and Blickman talk about how all the catcalls and awful behavior made them want to call in sick. Daily, they both allege, they heard men talk about female employees, debating which ones were fuckable.
Outside of work, Blickman says, she ran into a female Tesla worker. They talked a bit and Blickman confided to her that she was a lesbian. Blickman says the woman then aggressively came on to her, but Blickman told her she wasn’t interested in going on a date. The woman grew angry, and Blickman alleges she outed her to the rest of her Tesla workers.
In October, Blickman took Covid leave. She emailed Tesla HR while away and told them she needed to take stress leave. She detailed some of the harassment she claims that she and others had suffered. HR replied about meeting in person, but then, Blickman says, she didn’t hear anything else, so she didn’t go back to the factory.
“Of course,” she says. “There are people in that factory who see him as a god. If he talks like that, they know they can, too.” However, Tesla isn’t a stranger to litigation about its work culture. In 2021, a jury held the company liable in a racial-discrimination suit filed by a Black worker who alleged the use of the n-word was common at the factory and that racial slurs were scrawled on the walls.
The women’s legal filings detailed alleged incidents ranging from being asked for hand jobs to being stalked by drunk-on-the-job employees in the parking lot. While the cases make their way through the system and Tesla pushes back against the allegations, the fallout has been catastrophic for the women. One couldn’t leave her bedroom for weeks. Some feel ashamed, a common reaction among sexual-harassment victims.
She says she also soon learned that there were other dangers. First there were catcalls from male workers. Her court filing detailed some of them:“Whatever man you’re with doesn’t care about you because you’re working.” Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory in a drone photo from March 11, 2021. Women suing the company have alleged incidents ranging from being asked for hand jobs to enduring constant obscene language and being stalked in the parking lot.According to Brown’s court filing, her supervisor, who she claims frequently looked her body up and down, brushed it off.
Brown tells me a story that is also in her court filing. There was another male worker who reeked of booze and began asking her personal questions about her life and what she liked in a man. One night, she finished her shift before dawn and started making her way to her car in the vast parking lot. The lot wasn’t a picnic in the best of times — this is where the worker allegedly shot another employee. That night was worse, Brown says.
That was 18 months ago. Since then, Brown says, she has battled anxiety and gets nervous about leaving her house to run routine errands. She now has a job in a San Francisco hair salon, but she says she has trouble riding the BART train to work. “I can’t handle anyone sitting behind me or getting on and sitting next to me,” Brown says. “I’m working on it.”
By that point, Mederos felt that complaining wouldn’t do any good. She says she’d already stopped eating at work because whether it was a banana or yogurt, someone would make sex noises and ask her “How much more can you fit into your mouth?” Mederos claims co-workers passed the time throwing coins and crumpled paper at her and other women, aimed to go down their shirts.
“There were conversations about it,” says Mederos. “They would say, ‘Well, [Musk] says it, so why can’t we say any of this stuff?’” Mederos began dreading going to work. She would leave her house in the morning and get increasingly anxious the closer she got to the service center. about how he had always wanted to ride in one. Mederos got angry at her partner. She laughs about the experience for a second. But then she turns grim.
“It took courage for her to do that,” Lowe tells me. “We might not have heard from the other women. Jessica let them know they were not alone.”One summer day at Lowe’s office, the quiet of a San Francisco afternoon suddenly ends as a screaming motorcycle rips up the street. Eight floors up, Barraza’s body jerks and recoils in a conference room. Her hands shake.
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