Thinx 'She-E-O' Fondled Employees' Breasts, Fostered Environment of Fear According to Complaint

In a complaint filed to the City of New York Commission on Human Rights, a former employee of the period underwear company Thinx reportedly says she was subjected to lurid and repeated sexual harassment by founder and former CEO Miki Agrawal. The complaint, reported by New York magazine’s The Cut, alleges that Agrawal groped her employees’ breasts, talked at length about her sex life, changed frequently in front of her employees and Face Timed them from the toilet and while apparently naked in bed. Agrawal recently stepped down as CEO of Thinx, after every employee was interviewed by the company’s board, but is still employed there.

The employee who filed the complaint with the city is Chelsea Leibow, a former PR professional who wrote loopy promotional emails that Jezebel celebrated last year. In December, she emailed her client list announcing she was moving on. (Tipsters still at the company informed me then that the word on the grapevine was that she was considering legal action, a speculation that Leibow politely declined to address at the time.)

Noreen Malone at The Cut reports that Leibow’s complaint describes a disturbing pattern of sexual harassment. She told Malone that Agrawal first touched her breasts soon after she started at the company:

A month or two after her arrival, however, Agrawal said she had an “obsession” with Leibow’s breasts, and “helped herself,” as Leibow put it to me last week. “I didn’t say anything to her at the time. If you’ve ever been touched without your consent, you know it’s jarring. The whole atmosphere was one of: this is fine, this isn’t a big deal.” (In the formal language of the complaint, it was Agrawal’s “generally aggressive and retaliatory demeanor, position of authority, and style of management” that made Leibow too intimidated to speak up.)

In a previous profile, Malone described Agrawal’s love of busting taboos and social boundaries, and mentioned her urinating while on the phone with a New York magazine fact-checker. Leibow alleges that her fondness for boundary-pushing extended way, way too far: talking about her sex life, her experience in an “Orgy Dome” at Burning Man, changing in front of her employees, talking to a subordinate with one breast out of her top and fully exposed. She also engaged in “fat-shaming,” anonymous Thinx employees alleged to Malone:

When employees brought up the notion of expanding Thinx’s offerings into further plus sizes due to customer demand, Agrawal replied that anyone larger than a 3X ought to go to the gym and lose weight rather than purchase new underwear, according to multiple sources. Agrawal calls the fat-shaming accusations “unfounded,” and adds that she suggested having “fruit and berries to support healthy living.”

Leibow told Malone she was fired after months of raising concerns about Agrawal’s behavior; Agrawal disputes that, telling Malone she was fired for cause. Agrawal also denied the breast-touching and other alleged misbehavior to Malone, saying that Thinx is an open and free-ranging workplace and that conversations were being taken out of context.

Last week, Racked reported extensively on employees at the company who say they were underpaid and poorly treated. (Among other things, the company had no formal maternity leave policy in place at first, a bitter irony for a progressive company staffed by women and marketed towards women’s needs.)

Agrawal rebutted the Racked story in a Medium post, essentially claiming that healthcare and other benefits slipped her mind while she was focused on the company’s growth. She added that she addressed them as soon as they were “brought up:”

All of a sudden, health insurance, vacation days, benefits and maternity leave were brought up (at the time we didn’t have any pregnant women on the team unlike now where we have 3, including me! :-)) and when you’re a start-up and you’re growing and moving so fast (remember, we’ve only really hit this crazy growth period 18 months ago), to sit down and get an HR person and think about those things were left to the bottom of the pile of things to get done. We managed to put basic policies in place, raised health insurance benefits to $300 per employee per month from $150/month immediately after our employees asked for it, (which btw for a start-up was HUGE progress and I was SO proud to offer health insurance as early as we did). We took the team to Shakespeare on Hudson for a magical team retreat weekend and we had a moment of bonding hard, which I’ll never forget.

We were told by our sources that after departing as CEO, Agrawal was given the new title “chief vision officer.” In an email to Jezebel at the time, Agrawal wrote, “There’s nothing dramatic going on, I’m still the SHE-EO & Co-Founder of THINX. Like every other startup, there’s turnover in the first few years. THINX is no different, we have growing pains too, but now we are on the right track.”

Agrawal did not respond to a followup question about the difference between a CEO and a “SHE-EO.”