Fenox Venture Capital CEO Anis Uzzaman has filed a lawsuit in San Francisco alleging that an alleged anonymous victim of sexual harassment who posted a salacious story online was a male competitor trying to trash his rival.
SiliconValley.com reported that Uzzaman investigated the post, which was written in Japanese, and found that it was written in California. He is suing rival Brandon Katayama Hill, though Hill denies that he wrote the post.
Breitbart News recently reported that a campaign is under way to highlight sexual harassment as an issue in Silicon Valley in the run-up to the September 19 release of former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao’s book, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change. Although Pao lost her 2015 high-visibility sexual harassment lawsuit against the top Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield Byers, she has rebranded herself as the pioneering messenger paving the way for Silicon Valley women to fight back against the sexist abuse they take from men.
In this hyper-sensitive environment, lawyers for Uzzaman claimed last week in a San Mateo Superior Court defamation complaint that Hill, the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Asian B2B and B2C consulting firm “btrax,” posted a fake blog post on the Japanese language site Hatena in March and claimed to be a female Asian founder of a Silicon Valley start-up who was humiliated by a sexual encounter with a man resembling Uzzaman.
According to the UK Register, the post that was quickly translated into English and went viral in both languages. In it, an unnamed venture capitalist VC was described as having pressured the female founder into spending the night with him at a five-star hotel, and then refused to see her again.
Under the clever click-bait hook, “Happenings in Silicon Valley – I was sexually taken advantage of by a Silicon Valley VC,” the alleged victim claimed, “As I could not discuss this story with anyone, I decided to write it on a blog.” The victim claimed, “It happened a while ago, but I got sexually taken advantage of by a very famous Silicon Valley VC. It was not that I was in a relationship with him, I was just pushed around and taken advantage of.”
The fake blog post did not name the Fenox CEO, but the physical description and inferences made it clear to Uzzaman that he would be quickly be the VC singled out and denigrated as the alleged sexual predator.
The intent appears to have been to emulate the success of Susan J. Fowler’s epic February 19 post, “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber,” which outed the male frat-house antics she experienced from Uber’s top management. The ensuing scandal eventually forced CEO Travis Kalanick and 20 others to leave Uber.
As the swirling rumors circulated about Uzzaman, his attorneys went to court against the anonymous blogger in June. A Japanese court forced Hatena to reveal the alleged victim’s IP address, and the date and time the post went live. Uzzaman learned that the post was made at 7:05 a.m. on March 11 from a Comcast IP address in San Mateo.
Uzzaman’s attorneys then asked the San Mateo County Superior Court to order Comcast to reveal the identity of its subscriber using the IP address for the post. In what may go down in history as one of Silicon Valley’s ultimate “gotcha” moments, the Daily City personal IP address was in the same name as btrax’s CEO Brandon Hill.
Both btrax and Fenox have Japanese and other Asian language specialists that compete in in providing marketing and access to venture capital for tech startups in Japan and Korea.
Fenox attorneys allege that the accusations of sexual harassment were posted just before San Francisco’s 2017 Startup World Cup, which was hosted by Fenox Venture Capital on May 11, to inflict the maximum amount harm on Uzzaman’s reputation, and as a way to discourage female-led start-ups from working with Fenox.
Hill told the Register that he denied ever posting anything on Hatena, does not compete against Fenox, and believes that someone else probably used his Comcast internet IP address to post the offending post.
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