There’s this large company that sells and maintains a popular home security system to Americans, having been in business for over a century. The name brand is very widely recognized and trusted in communities across the South and Midwest. Janie (not her real name), is one of their top-performing sales and marketing executives in the Midwest, she’s been with the company for over a decade, having risen up from a local reseller to becoming a direct hire by the company. She takes a lot of pride in her work, and puts up great numbers. Janie’s a former police officer, and her experience in law enforcement informs a lot of her work in the home security field.
Janie hasn’t had the easiest life. She grew up poor, paid her own way through college – at which she was raped by a male fellow student. She went through a divorce a few years ago, she’d been married since the early 90s to Gabe, her former instructor at the police academy, 17 years her senior. They had a daughter together and it’d been a tolerable, if not happy marriage for a while, until Gabe, stuck in the middle ranks of the state police and jealous of Janie’s rising star, began to fool around on the side. When Janie confronted Gabe about the infidelity, he physically assaulted her. They tried to patch things up with counseling, but Janie finally ended it when she saw emails very strongly indicating that Gabe was still fooling around. The divorce was acrimonious and contentious, but thankfully for Janie it ended quickly owing to the mutual enmity.
Janie’s free to pursue her career unburdened by an abusive, cheating loser husband. Things are going great for her at work, except for one troubling new development. There’s a new product launch coming up, and her boss Mike, the company’s CEO, is looking to hire some fresh faces. Three of them – Greg, Walter, and Pedro – have some serious red flags. Greg’s been indicted for tying a woman up and sexually assaulting her, but the charges were dropped. Pedro’s been accused of beating both his wife and children, and has written fan fiction stories detailing some pretty sick shit happening to women. Walter’s ex-girlfriend and ex-wife both say he threatened to shoot them in the head during heated arguments that turned violent.
Mike doesn’t care, he needs these guys on the team. If he cares what Janie thinks, he hasn’t said it to her publicly. Shareholders and customers don’t care either. They just keep buying the stock and the product. Moreover, Janie isn’t saying anything about this. She’s just going to work and pretending everything’s okay. Maybe it bothers her immensely, maybe not at all. Either way there’s a very good chance she’s going to end up working alongside at least one of them every day she’s in the office, a woman who has survived physical and sexual abuse, counting among her colleagues men who have inflicted physical and sexual violence on women.
You might be asking yourself questions like “What kind of fucked up company does this to one of their top performers? Do they want her to have to relive the trauma she went through?” or “Why does integrity take a back seat to winning?” Perhaps more likely you’ll pick up that this story is a not particularly elaborate veiling of a very real life situation happening right now.
“Greg”, “Pedro”, “Janie”, “Walter”, “Mike”
Because that’s how it should be framed. Nowhere else would this kind of shit be tolerated by the stakeholders and yet it’s happening to “Janie” – herself a victim yet complicit all the same by failing to speak out. We’ll leave it to more deft hands to explain whether or not that’s “victim shaming” to call her out. The “company” as a whole is fucking abhorrent no matter what however.
By the way, “Janie” is Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, “Greg” is former Missouri Governor and Republican Senate Candidate Eric Greitens, “Pedro” is Pennsylvania Republican Senate Candidate Sean Parnell, “Walter” is Georgia Republican Senate Candidate Herschel Walker, and Joni Ernst and her husband Gail (not “Gabe”) were military officers, not cops. Gail was Joni’s ROTC instructor in college.