Tech CEO Forced Assistant to Sign 'Sex Slave' Contract, and Tormented Her With Sadomasochistic Bondage, Lawsuit Alleges
Tech CEO Forced Assistant to Sign 'Sex Slave' Contract, and Tormented Her With Sadomasochistic Bondage, Lawsuit Alleges
Former Tradeshift CEO Christian Lanng is accused of enslaving, torturing, and sexually abusing his assistant in a new lawsuit
A former Bay Area tech CEO was fired earlier this year after allegedly enslaving, torturing, and sexually abusing his assistant. He claims the pair had a consensual relationship that people would "celebrate" if it were fictitious.
Former Tradeshift CEO Christian Lanng denied the allegations levied against him and the billion-dollar company he co-founded that were made by a former employee in court Thursday.
"The shocking and vile claims in the lawsuit are categorically false, and I reject allegations that I subjected someone to any form of abuse during my tenure as CEO or at any other time of my life,” Lanng told The Messenger.
In the complaint, an unidentified woman alleged that Lanng sent her into “a dark abyss of unwanted sexual horror," according to The Mercury News.
You can not have sex with your employee or employer. The power dynamic ensures it can never be totally equal and there will always be some duress. If someone holds the power over your finances including your health insurance, saying No is never that simple.
I never thought of it that way. I always thought of it as "don't shit where you eat" because I ain't at work to make friends. I'm here to get shit done.
It's both, really. After some misadventures in my youth, I have refused to engage romantically with anyone in an organization I'm employed by. "Don't shit where you eat." As I have moved up to supervise others, it goes doubly so for people within my chain of command. That would be highly unethical.
Essentially, one is practical advice and the other is a matter of ethics. If you follow the first, the ethics are easy.
I think it's healthy to have clear boundaries with coworkers, they are not the same things as friends.
That said I spend 41 hours a week working, no way I'm not going to socialise with my coworkers. If I don't make any friends after several years of working at a place I feel I have done something wrong.
If you're not at work to make friends, it doesn't matter if you fuck colleagues. Worst case scenario, there's another colleague you dislike, but there are likely more than enough of those anyway.
Hiring her was a lapse of judgment. The rest of it sounds like a good time. BDSM relationships involving power exchange can be healthy but there is a huge risk that a messy breakup can go this way.
If my wife and I ever got divorced, I know she'd have the power to rake me over the coals with receipts. So I can give the guy the benefit of doubt, because based on what is alleged and my own personal experience it sounds reasonable that it might've been completely consensual at the time.
However as we grow as people, we can recontextualize our experiences and decide that hey this was really unhealthy and he should've known it was unhealthy and that she wasn't capable of consenting, and that could even be right. Some people give enthusiastic consent and it turns out to be some PTSD trauma response. Given the number of people in kink with trauma in their past, the lines can get really blurry.
I'm not saying she wasn't abused for sure, just that from a kink perspective his side of the story seems as plausible as hers. Regardless, I hope justice, whatever that may be, somehow prevails. But this case is going to hinge on whoever is more credible on the witness stand I think, and less on indisputable truths.
While the dom/sub fantasy is a common one, we need to remember that it has to stay a fantasy.
This was the real world, with a real world power dynamic in the workplace. That made consent dubious. And the number one rule of this sort of relationship is that CONSENT MUST BE CERTAIN.
Anyone with half a fucking clue would would not have this kind of relationship with an employee.
The employment came after the relationship and continued after it. I think that's a key difference that isn't conveyed in the headline. Yeah ethically he shouldn't have hired someone he was in that kind of relationship in, but at the time I'm sure it felt like a reasonable thing to do. Infatuation is like that.
Also saying dom/sub has to stay a fantasy is a different suggestion altogether and one I disagree with although perhaps only by degrees. It depends a lot on how real you allow for a fantasy to be. Ultimately there should be a safe word that allows a sub to withdraw consent at any time and so consent is always certain even if it's being vehemently denied by both people. In that manufactured ambiguity is where the excitement lies for many people.
Yeah, this sounds like someone who's only BDSM experience was the 50 Shades series, and therefore didn't understand how it works at all.
This is entirely based on a quote of him saying they were dating. Did she coberate that? Did anyone else? Is there a known history of their relationship or just this guy saying it exists?
She denied it.
This is the kind of nuanced response I was struggling to draft in my mind. I hope no one was abused. If she was, I hope she is vindicated.
I think your version is succinct and to the point while mine rambled a bit. I think there is value in both.
Based on the article they were together before working together. Because of that, while there may of course be elements where some position of power was abused after they started working together, it's quite unlikely that everything here was against her will.
This is likely a case where both people have been shitty to each other in some way.
Man... being into kink is dangerous if you have money and there's a scorched earth breakup. I have heard people in kink circles say that having a contract signed by both parties offers some protection, but here it is being used against him in court. Eeek.
It's fine as long as you don't do it with employees. If you find a woman with no social or financial dependence on you, you will be golden. It's actually not that difficult since most of the adult woman population isn't directly employed by you and a portion of them like being subs and doing kinky shit.
Why are CEOs always shit? Someone must've done a study into the type of people who want to be CEO, majority probably being psychopaths.
I've seen a few studies on this, I'd have to dig up some sources but socio/psychopaths do tend to seek power... So CEO rates of socio/psychopathy are significantly higher.
Same with politicians.
Regardless of what they sell or their stated ethos, once a corporation becomes publicly traded its only purpose becomes maximizing profits for its shareholders. The prevailing attitude in that section of the business world is that, if you can save a million and one dollars by dumping toxic waste on a children's playground, and the fine from the EPA is going to be one million dollars even, then it is your holy and sacred duty to poison those children for the sake of delivering that one dollar to the shareholders. In fact, failing to prioritize shareholder profits is the only thing corporations ever get in real trouble for.
People who thrive in this type of environment, let alone rise to the top, tend not to be good or moral people who are bothered by things like a conscience or a sense of compassion. To run a publicly traded corporation you need a person who can cause enormous amounts of suffering and blight in the world, and then go home and sleep comfortably and unbothered, soothed by the belief that everything is permissable as long as they made a line on a graph go up slightly.
that people would “celebrate” if it were fictitious.
Well that's just delusional. How exactly did he make it this far while having trouble separating TV from reality?
He's talking about 50 Shades of Grey. Which is a work of fiction that has been systematically pointed as problematic.
Their point was this dude isn't in a movie or tv show. A lot of crazy shit happens in movies that you wouldn't want to happen in real life, this is one of them.
Rich parents, probably.
I've seen that movie. It was really good. Maggie Gyllenhaal was great in it.
Ah yeah that movie was amazing, what was the name of it? Actor guy Spader really good too.
Secretary. Deserved an award for the sexiest non-pornographic film of the year.
Just another day at Twitter...X...
/s
I don't get it, the same story is repeated time and time again, how hard is it to not be a terrible person?
Unless they were born or raised with empathy, which is an obvious no, nothing bad happens to them if they're terrible. A ton of enjoyable things happen, even.
At that point, you're weighing the opportunity to do whatever you feel like at no consequence against doing what other people tell you to do for none of your own benefit (the only measurement that matters). Technically at a moderate cost to the one reigning themselves in. Under the looming threat of nothing if you do not comply.
I know the question was purely rhetorical and born out of the same frustration that I have. But I wish we'd drop this weird notion the more humanitarian of us seem to default to, like people who do this shit just haven't had the golden rule properly explained to them yet. They know. And they've figured out it's currently a farce.
They must have been afforded some protections to insulate them from consequences. It’s not just a realization that being a monster is easy and beneficial. The golden rule isn’t a farce for those of us who aren’t affluent, it’s a warning.
There's nothing terrible here. More just "stupid."
Well, that was horrifying to read.
Don't know either of them, but have to doubt her unwillingness based on the fact that any reasonable person I know would never sign or do that if they weren't into it.
Fear and power do a lot, and there is a whole legal section about how contracts signed under duress against the person's interests are not legally binding.
Like you, this is the first I've heard of this so I don't have any opinions at this time.
This is a vile take, and you should reexamine your empathy
Calm down. What evidence is there? It's a he said she said. We don't know who is lying.
Unfortunately manipulation, coercion, grooming, etc do exist.
"This person can't have been abused because they signed a contract"
More specifically, "this person enjoys being abused as can clearly be seen by the fact that they engage in contractual BDSM, a well-known device that kinksters use to negotiate BDSM power exchange."
The only unethical thing here was hiring the person he was dating - this article is exactly why you don't do that.
Everything described her aside from their unethical relationship is a sign of a loving kink relationship - like being collared is generally considered a big relationship step in BDSM. This looks like stupidity biting him in the ass more than it looks like abuse.
Tell me you're a sex pest without saying it
"we all know she enjoyed it till she didn't"
Fuck you