Clients, Staffers Slam Anti-Sexual Harassment Group Time's Up After Co-Founder Helped Advise Andrew Cuomo

Clients and staffers of the Hollywood celebrity-backed #MeToo group Time’s Up slammed the organization’s leaders in an open letter on Monday, claiming CEO Tina Tchen and recently resigned co-founder Roberta Kaplan betrayed the group’s values by advising New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who announced his resignation on Tuesday in the wake of an investigation that found he sexually harassed multiple women.

“We write to you as a collective group of survivors and victims who believe TIME’S UP is failing the survivor community,” begins activist and sexual assault survivor Alison Turkos in the letter.

“We believed in your mission and hoped that your investment in eradicating sexual assault and harassment in the workplace would change the tide to support us as we came forward, but we are disappointed,” Turkos continued. “TIME’S UP has abandoned the very people it was supposed to champion. The board continues to fail to heed the outcry from survivors. TIME’S UP is failing all survivors.”

The letter goes on to call out Tchen and Kaplan for being mentioned in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s report investigating allegations of sexual harassment by Cuomo, adding that the signers were “dismayed yet unsurprised” to discover the two had “weaponized their knowledge of survivors” to help the embattled governor.

In the detailed report, Kaplan and Tchen, in their roles at TIME’S UP, weaponized their knowledge of survivors experiences to help Governor Cuomo and his office retaliate against at least one of nearly a dozen women who were courageous in speaking up about the myriad of ways he abused his power and violated their bodies in the workplace.

“There is a consistent pattern of behavior where the decision-makers at TIME’S UP continue to align themselves with abusers at the expense of survivors,” the letter added. “TIME’S UP should be ashamed.”

Turkos goes on to claim that “TIME’S UP is deceiving survivors,” and details her accusations against Tchen and Kaplan:

Instead of helping survivors remain at the center of our own stories, we find out in the press that you were consulted by abusers to aid them in victim-blaming and undermining our ability to come forward. This behavior harms all survivors. This behavior discourages survivors from seeking support and speaking out and causes ripples of distrust felt throughout our movement. This behavior has us questioning who we can truly trust. Whether or not you agreed to help, perpetrators of harm felt comfortable reaching out to you for crisis management. That is a problem.

TIME’S UP is deceiving survivors. You asked us to come to you and trust you with our stories and our cases. We trusted that you had our best interests at heart. We trusted that what you said in public would match the support we’d receive in private. Survivors are so often let down by the system of justice in this country, and it is heartbreaking to see that TIME’S UP has become a willing participant in that never-ending labyrinth. The pattern of your behavior shows you do not deserve our trust any longer without serious structural changes.

On Monday, Kaplan stepped down from her position as chair of Time’s Up’s board of directors. New York investigators said Kaplan reviewed a draft op-ed letter, that was never published, that attacked Andrew Cuomo accuser Lindsey Boylan.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.