A Messy #MeToo Case May Be a First for Wall Street

Sara Tirschwell's fight against TCW could be the first one to go to trial
By Newser Editors,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 16, 2019 8:50 AM CDT
Updated Aug 18, 2019 6:42 AM CDT
A Messy #MeToo Case May Be a First for Wall Street
   (Getty/Damien VERRIER)

Wall Street is on track to have its first sexual harassment case in the #MeToo era reach the courtroom. And while most cases of this nature are messy legal affairs, this one involving Sara Tirschwell's allegations against a supervisor at TCW is especially so, writes Anna Silman at the Cut. The reason: She and her former boss there, Jess Ravich, dated from 2012 to 2013. She joined TCW as a fund manager in 2015 and alleges that Ravich coerced her into sex beginning in 2016, then turned against her when she stopped sleeping with him. She says TCW then fired her in retaliation for filing an HR complaint. Both Ravich, who no longer works at TCW, and the company adamantly deny any wrongdoing. In fact, Ravich denies they even had sex. TWC says she was fired for compliance violations.

“I understand why people don’t understand,” says Tirschwell, 54. “It’s hard for me to understand how someone I had a relationship with treated me like that." But she adds that there "are a ton of men in finance that are powerful and controlling and love to be master puppeteers," and she asserts that Ravich coerced into sex "because he thought I owed him." Silman talks to multiple who are sympathetic to Tirschwell but view what happened as an "office romance gone wrong." Many, including Tirschwell, expected TCW to quietly settle. But the "ensuing case is a particularly dramatic example of what can happen when a #MeToo allegation gets dropped into a world like high finance, where everything is litigated to the mat and nobody likes to lose," writes Silman. (Read the full story.)

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