The FT investigates Axel Springer’s #MeToo moment

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: The FT investigates Axel Springer’s #MeToo moment

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, February 14th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz heads to Ukraine and Russia this week to try and calm tensions, and the German publishing giant Axel Springer fired a top editor because of sexual misconduct charges. Our Berlin correspondent, Erika Solomon, investigated how the company handled the claims and what it says about the country’s media industry.

Erika Solomon
I think one woman describes to me as feeling like she was still stuck in the 80s.

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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German chancellor Olaf Scholz heads to Kyiv today and Moscow tomorrow. He’ll launch a fresh effort to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. This trip comes on the heels of a Joe Biden phone call to Vladimir Putin this weekend and other diplomatic efforts that are united for the most part. Here’s the FT’s Berlin bureau chief, Guy Chazan.

Guy Chazan
It is definitely the case that, you know when each of these world leaders meets Putin, they have a slightly different agenda. I mean, obviously, Germany’s relationship with Moscow is very much seen through the prism of the energy ties that they have, the fact that Germany is so dependent on Russian natural gas. And that inevitably colours the kind of negotiations that Scholz will be having with Putin.

Marc Filippino
No matter what Putin’s actually planning, Guy says the Russian leader is probably enjoying the attention.

Guy Chazan
Everybody’s beating a path to Putin’s door at the moment. He’s enjoying his moment in the limelight. He’s at a point of exerting maximum pressure on Nato and on the EU and on the US, and he knows that he’ll only be able to continue to exert that pressure if the troops are still there and talk of an invasion is still in the air. So it could just be coercive diplomacy on Putin’s part to extort the maximum advantage from this situation.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Berlin bureau chief, Guy Chazan.

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On Germany’s domestic front, the country recently had its first big #MeToo moment. The powerful German media company Axel Springer fired one of its senior editors at the tabloid Bild. Julian Reichelt was accused of having sexual affairs with junior women employees and engaging in other inappropriate behaviours. And it’s not just the affairs making headlines. It’s the way after the women came forward Axel Springer executives handled the situation.

Erika Solomon
And they agreed that the best way to handle it would be an internal investigation. So they hired an external law firm, and it was all done, you know, ostensibly very by the books.

Marc Filippino
That’s our Berlin correspondent, Erika Solomon. She began investigating the company’s by the books process after executives suspended, but then reinstated Reichelt, saying he hadn’t broken any laws.

Erika Solomon
That is true. He actually, in fact, did not break any laws, and he didn’t even break any company rules. Before the scandal happened, there were no company regulations surrounding workplace relationships or affairs. But what happened is that several months later, more than six months later, some allegations of what these affairs entailed started to make it into the press.

Marc Filippino
Yeah, including the New York Times, Erika, and it was actually after the Times came out with its story that Axel Springer fired Reichelt. At what point did you get interested in this story?

Erika Solomon
I’d always been interested in the story, actually, from when it, when Reichelt was first reinstated because I thought that the way they described their decision was interesting. I mean, if you think about it, like if a company says we’re bringing this person back because they didn’t break the law, it seems a little bit like a low bar. It felt to me like there was something unusual about the language that they were using. And what we did at the FT was we’d wanted to find out, OK, so this man in October was dismissed because of his behaviour. But what did his bosses know? What did the executives know? What did these major private equity investors that have backed Axel Springer know?

Marc Filippino
And just, you know, for context, for our listeners, as all this is happening, the company was expanding globally. It’s, you know, it’s snapping up big US publications, including one that’s really big here, Politico. So at this point, Erika, what did the higher ups at Axel Springer know about the sexual misconduct claims?

Erika Solomon
A lot. I mean, I think, of course, you can dispute how many details, the extent of each story, what they knew. But I think the important thing to keep in mind is that they were capable of getting almost all the significant elements of the story on their own before the legal inquiry into this began, the one that they initiated. So this idea that they didn’t know, which was their main defence when they chose to ultimately fire Reichelt, I think is problematic because you can argue whether how much each individual person on the executive board knew but it’s difficult, given the facts that we reviewed, to think that they had no way to try and find it out. So it shows a little bit of neglect or, you know, lack of care of duty. That’s one thing. The other thing was that there’s one particularly dramatic story in the Reichelt affair, which involves a woman with whom he met in hotel rooms and who says that she felt extremely depressed in the wake of that affair and, you know, how it affected her. And that story was in fact known to senior employees at Axel Springer with direct access to the board before their own investigation began. And the response that Axel Springer gives is that, well, we weren’t aware of any of the details in this transcript. But what we found as an example is that in fact they should have been able to have access to that entire story because the first time that story was told was not to the law firm that they hired, but rather to their own compliance officer.

Marc Filippino
So Erika, what did they say to you when you press them on this?

Erika Solomon
Yeah, this was a point that it’s been very hard for us to get clarity from them on. Of course, we raised it many times, and what we’re told by the company is that they feel like they acted appropriately and did everything that they could. And they said that there was a lot of barriers between who could tell who what. I am not in a position to decide that, but I do think that again, it goes back to the question of how much do you want to know? And I think that this is where you can really ask some questions of the executive boards.

Marc Filippino
So Erika, I just, you know, I just wanna say that this story is so interesting to me. And I think a big part of it is that the US had its #MeToo moment, right? It started about five years ago, and a lot of media executives and media personalities lost their jobs in the process after these sexual misconduct allegations came out. And it sounds to me that it hasn’t happened the same way in Germany, that it’s just having this moment now.

Erika Solomon
Yes, Germany. You know, if you ask a lot of female journalists here, they will, they will say that, you know, Germany never had its #MeToo moment when it came to particularly to media. And you know, one of the things that was striking to me was how many women who didn’t work at Axel Springer, but who just like worked at other organisations but found out I was researching this, started coming to talk to me and say, you know, it’s not just this situation at Axel Springer, there’s just this general, I think one woman described it to me as feeling like she was still stuck in the 80s. But you know, another element is that it is getting kind of trapped in these culture wars or, you know, political struggles that we’re seeing on a lot of democracies where the way that Axel Springer framed this, and I think in some ways this is for a lot of people the most troubling part of the story was instead of looking at this as like, OK, we have these allegations from women. What’s it about? How serious is it? Almost immediately, they started to believe that this was being engineered in some way by political opponents, that this is part of a plot or, you know, if not a plot, then at least, you know, some concerted effort by a lot of different political forces in Germany in the media to take them down. And that’s really how a lot of them saw this whole crisis.

Marc Filippino
Erika Solomon is the FT’s Berlin correspondent.

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Stockpiles of some of the world’s most important commodities are at historically low levels. Shortages are hitting everything from energy to agriculture. It’s especially acute for metals and in futures markets, where some spot prices, meaning immediate delivery, are now higher than prices for contracts for future delivery. Traders are basically paying big premiums to secure supplies immediately. Copper stocks at major exchanges now represent less than a week of global consumption, and even Arabica coffee reserves have fallen to their lowest level in 22 years. All these shortages will, of course, likely mean higher prices.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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