Why Do We Put Up With Misconduct at Work?
An early Me Too accuser interrogates the culture that protected her boss and her own role in enabling his misbehavior.
For more than a decade, a single question has plagued Reah Bravo whenever she looks back at her experience working on the Charlie Rose show: “Why did I put up with it, even once?” The issue was not only that her boss, longtime TV host Charlie Rose, sexually harassed her throughout her tenure as an unpaid intern, and later as an associate producer, in 2007 and 2008. As a small team of just 15 people, Bravo and her co-workers rationalized Rose’s abuse and often looked the other way. Bravo’s new book, Complicit: How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men, attempts to explain why they all allowed his inappropriate behavior to continue unchecked for so long.
Bravo was one of the first women to go on the record with allegations against Rose in November 2017, just weeks after Me Too became a global phenomenon. A subsequent investigation found that CBS had been alerted to Rose’s misconduct on several occasions; 35 women publicly accused him of sexual harassment. Rose has apologized for his behavior, though he has also said he didn’t think all the allegations against him were accurate.
In Complicit, Bravo peels back the layers of her experience working for Rose to examine why sexual misconduct remains so hard to root out at work. With anthropological precision, she looks at how our obsession with work as a key part of our identity, cultural narratives, and our evolutionary need for connection can allow abuse to flourish. If we truly want to end it, she argues, we must first recognize and disrupt our own complicity in upholding the status quo.
Can you tell me why you wrote this book? How did you come to that decision?
It started back when I first got a message via LinkedIn from Amy Brittain of the Washington Post asking if I wanted to talk about my experience working for Charlie. I knew I was going to have to talk to her, that there was something to work out. It wasn’t just out of rage or anger toward anything that had happened to me, or toward Charlie, but also the sensation that I had been a part of it, that I needed to take some sort of responsibility. Because it wasn’t just that I was one of Charlie’s victims — I also worked in the office, and I had also been a part of a normalization of a very toxic work environment.
There’s a uniquely American flavor of abuse that happens in our workplaces. All of these things with Charlie, I thought I would take them to my grave. I used to wonder, Someday when I get married, will I be able to tell my husband this one story? Who will I ever share it with? I’d come to the conclusion that I was going to stop even sharing it with myself.
Anyway, fast-forward: This amazing exposé comes out with ironclad reporting on Charlie’s abuses. And I felt — like so many other women I have talked to since who went on the record — that sometimes the facts, however truthful they are, feel like a disservice. There’s so much more at play that you want to peel back. That’s what compelled me to write a piece for the New York Review of Books about my experience working for Charlie. That then generated interest in a book, and I quickly realized that it was a worthwhile examination — because the deeper I dug into it and the more I questioned the cultural narratives of my adolescence, the more I questioned my “Americanness.”
You write that this book is about women’s patriarchal conditioning. In which ways do you think this conditioning has made us complicit to sexual misconduct in the workplace?
How much time do you have? The complicity that I’m exploring — another word for that is internalized patriarchy and all of the ways that it just seeps into your bones, all of the ways in which our social hierarchy, one that is based on gender and race, is a part of us. This type of complicity is not intentional. It’s a complicity that lives within us because our culture lives within us. My personal experience was guiding my perspective, and to look back on everything that had shaped my behavior, how I had responded, how I had justified things, or how I had just compartmentalized things and moved on — it’s not simply about older white men in charge of our lives. It’s also about our political economic system. It’s about our psychological need for a sense of control and the cultural narratives that we reach for when we create our sense of self. Then, after unwanted encounters, it happens in how we seek to explain things and move forward in whatever way protects our well-being.
It’s been nearly seven years since Me Too exploded and became a global phenomenon. You are someone who spoke up when that first wave of stories came out. What do you think the movement has accomplished since then, and what have been some of its limitations?
When Me Too first ignited, it was like a mug of ayahuasca. Suddenly, so many people saw things and understood things differently. It was revelatory. And then life goes on. We get busy and we get back to work, and every week there’s an existential crisis in the news. We need to get back to that ayahuasca moment, because that’s when so much potential for change is at our disposal. We’ve also been asking for seven years now what to do with the perpetrators and what to do with the Me Too villains. Maybe we should also be asking what to do with ourselves.
If there was an easy five-step program to exorcise our internalized patriarchy, we’d have passed that pamphlet around. This challenge is not only mammoth, but it is something that, to confront it, needs to be collective. I am hopeful because I don’t really think there’s an alternative. Gender inequality is the linchpin in so many things that don’t seem to be working for us right now. We’re at this point, socially and politically, where our narratives are just crumbling. If there was ever a time to collectively undertake the exorcism of our internalized patriarchy, now might be good.
This book engages with workplace misconduct in the U.S. context, linking it to neoliberal policies, our individualistic culture, and the ways patriarchy manifests. But you haven’t lived in the U.S. for a decade or so. What differences do you see between the U.S. and Belgium in these areas? And how did that distance, both physical and cultural, help you unspool the issues in the book?
I could never have written this book had it not been for an incredibly large rupture in my life. In 2015, I was dating my now-husband, who took a job in Belgium. I had an unexpected pregnancy. So I moved across an ocean, I am no longer single, and I am physically no longer the person I was. When Me Too hit, I’d already been kind of taking more of an anthropological perspective in trying to understand why I had exhausted myself throughout my 20s and my 30s. Just like, What was all of that?
In the United States, we are so caught up and consumed by our own sense of heroism that people in Europe just don’t burden themselves with. They’re less burdened by the sense of who they need to be and how they need to perfect themselves. For Americans, whether it’s our founding myths, our bootstrap mythology — we’ve been shaped by our neoliberal culture. In the book, I go into not just how much we Americans like to work but how much we define ourselves by work. That’s not the case here. There’s the saying “Americans live to work, and Europeans work to live.” When you live to work, you’re going to overlook a lot in the workplace, because you’ve already sacrificed a certain element. For some people, to call out workplace abuse seems counterproductive, and it also doesn’t speak well to their toughness.
What you’re describing is this sort of perfect storm where you have this idea of your work as such a massive part of your identity and this sunk-cost mentality of, I’ve already invested so much time here, and if I speak up, then I’m just throwing that all out the window. Plus, due to the income-inequality aspect of it, when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, the cost of speaking up is too high.
And we just don’t want to be weak. In the book, I quote a woman who was the point person for people to go to when they felt that they were being harassed or subjected to discriminatory conditions. As much as she believes in these principles, she acknowledged that she would never be able to go to somebody if she was being harassed. Like, If I can’t handle that — if I’m not tough enough for that — then I’m not cut out for this job.
How much of that do you think is generational? You spend a lot of time in the book contextualizing your own experiences as a Gen-X woman who came of age with very specific cultural narratives around feminism, sex, and empowerment.
I do think there is an element among Gen-X women where we just figure we have to be able to handle it. And if we can’t, then we’re more prone to self-blame. I explore some of the studies of college-age women in the early aughts and the extent to which our narratives for understanding heterosexual encounters mirror the narratives that we then took into the workplace. There was no room for nuance. It was just like — you’re up for something or you’re not up for something. Either you’re in control or you’re a victim. I was speaking with a peer of mine from the Charlie Rose show, and, gosh, there was behavior that we didn’t even think was illegal. We thought it was questionable and shady, but at no point were we like, This is illegal. It never entered our minds. That has certainly changed for some of the younger people that I spoke to. They’re significantly more versed in what is and is not permissible in the workplace. At the same time, the forces that I explore in the book, a lot of them transcend generations. Polling has indicated that these generational divides don’t really hold up when it comes to women’s sexual agency and their opinions of Me Too. Lots of differences are more a matter of age. An older woman who spent more time in the workforce, for example, might have different expectations and be willing to put up with more because she’s seen more and she’s been around more.
When Me Too exploded, there was an almost instant backlash, and since then there has been a lot of hand-wringing about “What do we do with bad men?” — though in reality, they so often don’t face real professional and/or criminal consequences. The backlash these days feels like it is at a saturation point. What do you make of it all?
Me Too cannot move forward — and we cannot get to a better place — without accountability. That said, I really want to get to a place where the men, specifically the perpetrators, cease to be at the center of the story. Part of what makes this such a difficult conversation is that we’re talking about accountability for actions that span the gamut. P. Diddy is not Aziz Ansari. And also, me saying that, it’s kind of gross. I just referenced two really famous men. What about all the people who have come forward in their workplaces with accusations against men who aren’t famous? Those are the women I have enormous respect for.
People frequently told me how brave I was to speak out against Charlie Rose given how powerful he was. At the same time, when you’re that powerful and that well known, it is an open secret. Speaking out against somebody who had misbehaved in such a high-profile way for so long is much safer than speaking out when you are, for example, the women I interviewed who work in the Dallas wine scene and spoke out against men in their industry. Just the conviction it takes to be like, I’m going to do this because we deserve better. It’s not going to be fun, but we deserve better. To stand by that demands so much more than what I put forward.
What do you hope readers take away from Complicit?
I want them to know that they have a role to play and that it is important to have faith in our capacity for change. When I worked for a human-rights organization, our executive director used to reference architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller. He talked about how getting an enormous ship to move and change direction comes down to a small part called the trim tab. It’s this teeny-tiny thing, and if you can get it to move, you move the entire ship. Every day, I’m presented with an opportunity to confront my own internalized patriarchy — this is a really crucial time to be shaping the narratives that we want to live by. So you can move your people with you and trust the whole ship is going to move, too.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.