Susan Fowler - Whistleblower: My Journey To Silicon Valley And Fight For Justice At Uber

Its important that you dont share the details of this meetingor that this meeting even happeneduntil after the investigation has concluded.

Sitting directly across from me, asking me to keep our meeting secret, was the former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder. His hands were clasped together, his elbows resting on the table, a plastic binder filled with notes open before him. To his left sat Tammy Albarrn, a partner at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling. She stopped combing through her own notes for a moment and held her pen in her hand, staring at me over the dark rectangular frames of her glasses, awaiting my answer.

I understand, I said, nodding. Albarrn crisply put her pen back down to her notes.

Two months earlier, I had written and published a blog post about my experiences as a software engineer at the ride-sharing company Uber Technologies. In the blog post, which I had titled Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber, I described being propositioned by my manager on my first official day on Ubers engineering team; the extent to which Ubers managers, executives, and HR department had ignored and covered up harassment and discrimination; and the retaliation Id faced for reporting illegal conduct. It was a meticulously, cautiously, deliberately crafted portrait of the company, one that I had constructed with almost excruciating care, every sentence backed up by written documentation.

My story quickly caught the attention of the media and the public. Several hours after Id shared a link to it on Twitter, it had been retweeted by reporters and celebrities and was a developing story covered by local, national, and international news outlets. Travis Kalanick, then the CEO of Uber, shared a link to my blog post on Twitter and said, Whats described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. He then hired Eric Holder and Holders firm, Covington & Burling, to run a thorough investigation into the companys culture. It was clear that Kalanick wanted to send a message: he was taking this seriouslyso seriously that anyone involved in what had happened, anyone responsible for the story that was now being repeated by every major news outlet across the globe, would be fired.

Three days later, The New York Times published its own damning account of Ubers culture. The day after that, Waymo, a subsidiary of Google that was developing self-driving cars, sued Uber for patent infringement and trade secret theft. Less than a week later, a video leaked of Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver. And that was only the beginning. By the time I found myself across the table from President Obamas attorney general, the public consensus was that something was very wrong with Uber, but nobody was quite sure of the extent of the problem or who should be held responsible for it. Some people, Kalanick had shouted at the driver in the grainy dashcam video, dont like to take responsibility for their own shit.

As the drama unfolded in the press, I waited. I didnt know what was going to happen, and everythingincluding my fate, the fate of my ex-coworkers, and the fate of Uberseemed to be riding on the results of the Covington & Burling investigation. Id been reluctant to meet with Eric Holder, afraid that I would mess everything up, that I would say the wrong things, that I would somehow jeopardize the investigation. But now that I was sitting across from him, there was so much I wanted to say, and I didnt know where to start. I didnt know how much I should tell him, how much I should leave out. I wondered if I should tell him about my coworkers suicide, about the private investigators who seemed to be following me everywhere, about the rumors Uber was spreading about me and my husband, about how Id heard that Uber had been destroying documentation in order to conceal its mistreatment of employees.

As I sat there, my mind racing, I looked up at him.

Start from the beginning, he said.

I wasnt supposed to be a software engineer. I wasnt supposed to be a writer, or a whistleblower, or even a college graduate, for that matter. If, ten years ago, you had told me that I would someday be all of those thingsif you had shown me where life would take me, and the very public role I would end up playing in the worldI wouldnt have believed you.

I grew up in poverty in rural Arizona and was homeschooled until my early teens; after that, my mother had to return to the workforce and, unlike my younger siblings, I couldnt go to public school, so I was on my own. As a young teenager, I worked below-minimum-wage jobs during the day and tried to educate myself at night. I feared my life was heading in the same direction as that of many other teenagers living in the rural Southwesttoward drugs, unemployment, and trailer parks. But I refused to accept this as my fate, and resolved to fight for a better life. I worked very hard to educate myself, and managed to get into college.

The struggle to determine my own direction in life didnt end there. When I wanted to study physics at Arizona State University, but couldnt because I didnt have the necessary prerequisites, I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. When I was also prevented from studying science and mathematics at Penn, I once again fought for the education I so desperately wanted and believed I deserved. After my dream of becoming a physicist was derailed by an incident with a male student in my lab, I had to choose an entirely new career, which led me to Silicon Valley. If youre reading this book, you probably know the story of what happened next: I was sexually harassed and bullied at Uber, and I fought until I had exhausted all options except oneto leave the company and go public with my story.