CEA's response to sexual harassment

A detailed account and cultural critique

In this piece, I discuss the sexual harassment I experienced at the Centre for Effective Altruism, the organisation’s response, the outcomes of two independent legal reviews, and the final settlement. In the second part of this piece, I make cultural critiques of CEA and EA more broadly.

Everything shared here reflects my own experience and perspective. I have anonymised the perpetrator, but I reference specific leadership roles where I believe this to be appropriate and necessary.

Trigger warnings: non-specific reference of rape and specific discussion of sexual harassment

TL;DR (One-page summary)

After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients.

After I filed a harassment report, the incident was independently investigated and determined to be harassment. Despite this, I was denied access to the document for the entire investigation (and still have only seen a summary provided by CEA’s legal), I feel the outcomes focused on policy updates rather than safeguarding, and I was expected to continue working in the same office as the perpetrator. He would not be temporarily barred from the events I was responsible for organising. To my knowledge, he did not express any contrition. I found the working conditions to be intolerable. I resigned.

Despite my resignation, I appealed to the board. A second external investigation determined the conduct to be sexual harassment under the Equality Act 2010 and found that CEA failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it, which organisations are required to do under the UK’s Worker Protection Act 2023.

After the appeal concluded, and after I informed the board that I was planning to share my experience, things changed. The CEO stepped in and provided meaningful remediation. CEA initiated a process leading to the perpetrator’s resignation and sent me a written apology that I found genuine. They hired an experienced HR Manager and instituted a new workplace policy. We reached a settlement. CEA paid for a lawyer to advise me on the agreement and obliged by foregoing a confidentiality clause.

Getting to this point took over a year, two external legal reviews, an appeal, my resignation, and, to whatever extent it mattered, my willingness to write publicly. There are two truths here. I am grateful for a final resolution, but I found the past year harmful, often indefensible, and unsustainable. I am writing this post for two reasons: to speak to the cultural issues I believe exist within CEA and EA more broadly, including a culture that continues to enable sexual harassment, and to speak to victims and members of the community directly.

In the rest of this piece, I provide a more detailed account. I then present what I believe to be the main cultural issues and my perspective on them.

A more detailed account

The sexual harassment incident

In the summer of 2024, I was raped. The assault itself is unrelated to CEA and EA. I will not discuss it further in this post.

In November 2024, “Riley” wrote a document about me. He sent it to HR, the CEO, his manager, and two other colleagues. Once the COO joined, HR gave her the document to read as well. It was also shared with the in-house legal team. By the end of the appeal, at least 11 employees had been shared on it. The organisation is only around 50 people.

In this document, Riley wrote out an account of me being raped. Though, he chose to use the word “sex” to describe the incident. He speculated about my mental health, my partner, my friends. He covered years of my life through his perspective. Riley also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.

One of my colleagues who received the document told me about it informally. “You can’t let HR know I told you,” she kept saying, worried about getting in trouble. She wasn’t willing to send me a copy, but she read parts aloud a few months after receiving it. Towards the end, she read something like, I do feel bad winning points on her, since she was just raped.

I messaged CEA’s Community Health team. To my understanding, they tried to step in but CEA said they should not get involved with an HR issue. People Operations claimed they would handle it.

Nine months went by and I heard absolutely nothing. No safeguarding steps were taken. The document remained in circulation.

For a while, I tried to block the harassment out entirely. I was completely overwhelmed and simply did not have the capacity to process it. I was already managing a PTSD diagnosis as a result of the rape and an ongoing criminal investigation with the UK police. I no longer trusted CEA’s HR. Not to mention, I didn’t have access to the document myself.

As the months went on, I became increasingly anxious and embarrassed around leadership and those who had read the document. Increasingly dissociated. I began having nightmares about new documents being circulated. My therapist noted my PTSD symptoms were continuing to worsen. When I ran into Riley at the office, I would often freeze. I started eating lunch in my team’s room to avoid the cafeteria, or skipping lunch altogether.

Eventually, nine months after the harassment, I reached a breaking point. With my partner’s encouragement and support, I finally filed an official complaint to the legal team.

The investigation

When I disclosed my complaint to the director of my team, Amy, she began advocating for me and pushed for an external review. I remain deeply grateful to her; she is an exceptional leader. In terms of those involved with the investigation at CEA, I feel that she was my only source of genuine empathy, care, and true integrity. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

CEA hired an external counsel to reach a determination, but CEA’s legal team conducted the interviews themselves. As they collected my statement, without warning, they began reciting Riley’s perspective: “Riley says he was just trying to explore if he should continue working at CEA. The document is about more than just you.”

“What? But it describes me being raped? It talks about asking me out twice? Who cares if the document also complains about CEA?”

I was told that, from legal’s perspective, that was the worst of the document. I asked to see it myself before they reached a determination, even if parts needed to be redacted. I was given a vague promise that they would “look into it.” I was not provided any access before a determination was reached, something the appeal investigator later criticised.

In October 2025, on a call, CEA’s legal team informed me that external counsel had determined the incident met the definition of harassment. I had wanted Riley to be temporarily barred from attending CEA retreats and EA Global events, especially the latter, given that organising EA Global was my core responsibility and attendance was optional for him. I wanted a working environment that did not trigger an extreme stress response for me.

CEA did neither of these things.

Instead, CEA’s legal team informed me that a “no-contact order” would be issued and that other actions were being taken that could not be disclosed, but that Riley and I would be invited to the same spaces. How do you reasonably manage “no-contact” at an approximately 50-person organisation between two employees who work out of the same office? I have no idea. I don’t believe CEA does either, though they did throw around ideas like “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times.” I didn’t stay long enough to find out how my teammates would react when I said, “sorry, I can’t walk to lunch that way, my personal path is to the right.”

They offered to pay for me to speak with a doctor and undergo an Occupational Health Assessment. I did not want to speak with a doctor. I wanted to be away from the person who harassed me. I wanted all the senior leaders who read about me being raped and did nothing to apologise. I wanted a normal working environment. It felt like CEA was effectively punishing me for being a victim. Finally, they stated they would be mandating appropriate training for all managers moving forward and they would be updating their policies.

Unfortunately, the anti-harassment policy had already been updated in response to a prior sexual harassment incident that was also mishandled, which the CEO discusses in this post from 2024. The previous policy update only occurred after one of the victims went public (see this Time article discussing a culture of sexual harassment and abuse in EA, from 2023). I’m no expert; however, if a prior policy update wasn’t sufficient, perhaps policies aren’t the problem.

There was no plan for formal acknowledgment nor remediation from Riley. To my knowledge, the same was true for all the senior staff who had read the document and done nothing.

The harassment determination felt meaningless. Most importantly, they were asking me to continue working in what I felt to be an incredibly demeaning and hostile environment.

I quit.

The appeal and final report

Despite my departure, I was still interested in accountability. I did not agree with CEA’s framing of the harassment as, effectively, “an overshared HR document.” That was the exact phrasing a board member used with me during the appeal, despite full knowledge of the initial determination. I did not believe CEA’s decided outcomes were sufficient for an organisation that claims they “want to help build a radically better world.” I did not personally see evidence that they had learned anything from the prior mishandling of sexual harassment. I did not believe Riley’s continued employment after his perpetration, and absence of contrition, left other employees in a safe and dignified position. I wanted a deeper investigation and I wanted written findings directly from an external party, not filtered through CEA. And so, I appealed to the board.

After a second investigation, the board-appointed investigator determined the conduct to be sexual harassment under the UK Equality Act 2010. The investigator also stated, “overall, in my view, reasonable steps were not taken at the time of the writing and circulation of the Document to prevent sexual harassment.” This is a breach of the Worker Protection Act 2023.

The investigator also noted, “I have been told [by CEA] that employees can be unusually transparent with their manager… and they value being able to have very candid conversation.”

This is the same narrative CEA’s legal team kept repeating to me. But, the investigator went on to say, “I do not consider that a mitigating factor here… notwithstanding the culture, it is hard to understand from an outside perspective why for [each manager] individually there was not a recognition that the information contained was highly personal and sensitive and therefore inappropriate, even if they did not recognise it as sexual harassment per se.”

And to that I say, I also find it hard to understand from an inside perspective. I do not understand it at all. My team, the Events Team, was also operating within CEA. We also had an unusually transparent culture and valued candid conversation. And yet, I never sexually harassed anyone. To my knowledge, no one on my team did. I never wrote a document describing my colleague being raped, and my attempts to ask them out, and my personal speculations regarding their mental health, and then shipped it off to the CEO and four other employees in the name of… candid workplace conversation?

If I had received a document like that, I would have recognised it as targeted harassment and I would have done something. I would have been exceedingly alarmed by the set of beliefs one must possess to write such a document at all: that it is acceptable to describe a man having “sex” with a colleague from one’s own perspective; reasonable to assess her mental health and personal life; to reflect on her romantic availability; and to share all of this with other colleagues and those responsible for approving her salary, title, and benefits. We are not discussing a neutral collection of facts that were “overshared.” The document expressed attitudes about myself, women, consent, objectification, and entitlement that I found to be blatantly misogynistic, regardless of “why” it was written.

Public accountability versus internal processes

During the appeal, a board member asked to have an informal call with me, separate from the investigation process. He floated the idea of a settlement agreement. I made it clear upfront that I intended to discuss my experience publicly and I would not sign anything that barred me from doing so.

I understand some may object to me saying this. But in the spirit of a transparent culture, I wanted to be clear: sexism is not something I will tolerate. I have spent years writing publicly about this topic. Writing is an important outlet for me, and while I take care to be honest, accurate, and fair, I do not intend to stop writing. Not to mention, I had already spent months trying to pursue internal resolution at great personal cost.

Some few weeks after this call, the appeal concluded and the investigator shared his report. The CEO reached out to me that same day. Things had significantly shifted.

Riley had left the organisation. CEA had hired a new, experienced HR Manager. CEA had announced a new Professional and personal interactions policy. I’ve reviewed it. It appears to vaguely gesture at what happened to me, in more generalisable terms, and then it instructs employees on what to do in response.

The CEO also sent me a written apology that finally used the words “sexual harassment.” Prior to this, the only apologies I had received were effectively, sorry we didn’t respond to your personal data being shared.

I’m very hopeful regarding the new HR Manager, who apparently brings prior experience at multiple organizations, and who specifically has experience with employee disability accommodations and investigations. I think hiring for this position was an excellent decision.

With respect to the new policy, I personally found it ineffective and scrambled. I simply don’t think they have a policy issue. I mean, the sexual harassment I experienced was literally written down and sent, by the perpetrator himself, to several of the designated points of contact for reporting. I don’t believe the policies at the time were ambiguous on what should have happened next. But fine, it’s not my organisation. As long as no one else is writing about my rape, CEA can continue drafting as many documents as they want.

Which leaves us with a few sad questions: did all of this happen because the appeal genuinely revealed to relevant leaders the scope and severity of what had transpired, something that was apparently unclear after a year, my direct advocacy, and an initial investigation? Or, did something materially change that I am not aware of? Or did all of this finally happen because of my stated intention to write publicly? Unfortunately, it’s impossible for me to know the answer to that question.

The final settlement agreement

After the appeal, I signed an agreement not to bring legal claims in exchange for compensation. I believe it was in both our best interests to settle. However, I will note that they made the process very simple and agreed not to include a confidentiality clause. The latter is genuinely unusual, it surprised my lawyer. CEA has never tried to deter me from writing publicly, which I respect.

My partner and I have now donated $1,135 from the agreement as a kind of closure: $500 to CEDOVIP, $500 to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, and $135 to Rights of Women UK. The third is a nonprofit I personally used several times. Alongside advocacy, they operate phone lines that provide free legal advice to women in the UK. Without this charity, I would not have reported my rape to the UK police. And separately, I would have been even more overwhelmed by CEA’s appeal process.

In all honesty, writing this post is deeply depressing because I know the humans on the other side of this at CEA and I assume they are very stressed. I genuinely did appreciate the CEO’s final apology. We had a call after the appeal concluded. He was kind and seemed genuinely regretful.

There was something tragic about the call. By that point, I’d had to fight for myself so much and for so long that each conciliatory sentiment was bound to ring hollow to me, even if it was meant sincerely. And I think he knew that. He said he wished that he, or anyone else, had reported the document the moment it was sent out. Me too.

I really do hope things get better. Truly. And I leave it to each reader to come to their own conclusions.

I still think there is a lot of good in effective altruism

I am grateful to those who speak up when they see issues within EA. I understand why there are many who do not like the community nor the culture. It makes me furious to hear stories of women rightly leaving after they’ve faced harassment or exceedingly poor treatment. I’m glad they took their talents elsewhere.

Effective altruism, as an idea, is certainly not the only way to do good. And, to state another obvious thing: it is by no means the only community doing, or trying to do, important work. That said, I personally still like EA. There are nonprofits within the space, and those heavily supported by the space, whose philanthropic work I find to be exceptional. The core ideas underneath effective altruism helped me to develop my personal values in important ways. I have been truly moved by some of the thinking that has come out of this community and I’ve met many beautifully giving people through it. When I want to make a donation, the first thing I do is check EA-aligned or inspired charity evaluators.

So, I still like it. I’m still around. But, I have no intention of enabling sexism. If I may make a request to others in the community, and especially to those running organisations: let’s be so much better than this. Let’s endeavor not to perpetrate and protect sexism, lest more women continue to be abused and pushed out. Let’s actually stand up for victims. If the community claims to be morally serious, then let’s be morally serious.

Various cultural reflections

For the rest of this piece, I’d like to address some of the cultural issues I’ve observed and the harmful sentiments that were relayed to me. Afterwards, I have a short section intended for those who have experienced harassment.

1) Sexual harassment is not the natural result of an “open” and “high-trust” culture, it is the natural result of misogyny.

When stories like mine are shared with EAs, I regularly hear: “but I like that EA organisations are open. I don’t want people to be scared to say things to their manager.”

To those people, I have great news: sexually harassing women is not the natural result of an open culture. Those are two separate things!

The Events team at CEA had a very open culture. I felt safe with our director, Amy. After I was assaulted, I was transparent with her. She was empathetic and respectful. She advocated for me within the organisation. My teammates and I had a lovely working relationship. We could be open about our emotional states, voice our opinions, and support each other.

And guess what? No harassment.

To suggest that the sexual harassment of women is some kind of foregone and necessary collateral of an open culture is absurd. If that’s what’s happening, you don’t have an open culture. You have a misogynistic culture.

If you cannot discuss your feelings in the workplace without sexually harassing another person, it’s time to sit down and learn the difference between honest, meaningful, relevant communication and the nonconsensual sexualisation of a colleague.

I have no interest in aligning with a community that treats the harassment of women as acceptable because it’s so gosh darn important that men don’t have to “censor” a single thought or genius idea. That’s not a high-trust community. That’s a sexist community catering to the preferences of its most morally and emotionally underdeveloped members. One that apparently believes itself capable of proposing complex solutions to pressing global issues, but not capable of reliably protecting its workforce from sexual harassment.

2) The danger of EA’s fixation on intent and why “he didn’t mean it” is not good enough.

Throughout this process, almost everyone, and most especially CEA’s legal team, appeared to me overly fixated on Riley’s intent. And they seemed to take his stated intent at face value.

In my opinion, EAs keep missing an incredibly important fact: perpetrators of harm are rarely, if ever, reliable narrators of their own intent.

If you decide, by default, that everyone in your group is self-aware, well-intentioned, and telling the truth, and you then make their intent a central factor in assessing misconduct, you will almost never find abuse. You’ve made it structurally impossible. And this is how you end up with a culture that enables sexual harassment.

When EAs were faced with what Riley did, I kept hearing some version of: “but surely he didn’t mean it that way.” What way, exactly? As if his intent, self-reported and unknowable, should override the content of the document, the impact on me, and the judgment of independent investigators.

Quite frankly, at this point, I couldn’t care less about what he “meant.” I care about the facts of what he did and wrote. The fixation on his internal experience, at the expense of what actually played out, is precisely how victims become expected to absorb whatever perpetrators decide to do.

3) Cowardice and deference at CEA.

In my opinion, a lot of people at CEA witnessed at least part of what I was experiencing and did basically nothing. The initial document wasn’t reported by any of the recipients. Some of them I’d worked with for years. Later on, there were many senior colleagues who appeared unwilling to disagree with leadership or HR on my behalf. I found there to be a strange amount of deference to legal and to the CEO and COO. From my perspective, almost everyone seemed anxious, uncomfortable, and unwilling to say or do much.

I felt surrounded by minimisation and a fixation on preventing future incidences. I think this happened, at least in part, because prevention efforts are emotionally easier than asking “how can we actually support the victim currently in front of us, who says we’ve enabled all this?” In terms of those involved with the investigation, The Events Director, Amy, truly felt like the only one actually worried about me as a person. Outside of her, the conversations often felt like:

Them: Okay, investigation is done! Let us know if you have any ideas for how to prevent this from happening in the future.

Me: Well, actually, I’d love some meaningful help right now. This is still happening to me. I don’t feel like I can work here anymore. I’m scared that I’m about to lose my job because I don’t think I can stay.

Them: Right, well, we’re updating policies!

This is satire, but it’s also genuinely how these conversations felt to me. Like I was being turned into a cautionary tale while I was literally still there. No one seemed brave enough to sit down and actually admit that, after months, things were still going terribly wrong and I needed help.

I want to name this for what I think it is: cowardice.

I think everything that happened to me was cowardly. I think many of leadership’s decisions were cowardly. I think all the deference and inaction from others was cowardly. The lack of advocacy. The focus on updating policies while I was suffering and no longer able to work. There was so much avoidance. I found it all cowardly.

4) Women in EA are often encouraged to try and settle things “informally” or to trust their organisations — another abuse of “high-trust” culture.

EA organisations love to foster an attitude of “we’re all on the same team.” But informal processes are more likely to fail victims and enable perpetrators. “Same team” does not work in the face of power imbalances. I would strongly encourage women not to defer to their organisations in these cases. Seek external support, trust what you have experienced, and if applicable, know the law.

I found my interactions with CEA’s legal team beyond frustrating. In my opinion, they rarely explained my options or the process. I trusted that they understood the severity of the harassment and I was painfully let down.

As part of the appeal, the legal team claimed they had foregone a formal grievance hearing because they didn’t want me to feel like I had to run the process myself. But they also said they applied a harassment test rather than a sexual harassment test because I never specifically asked them to do the latter.

So, was I supposed to trust them to run the process, or was I supposed to know the law in such detail that only the tests I proactively cited would be applied? A competent investigator would surely inform the victim of their different options. And let them see the document in question. Same team, right?

Another example: CEA’s policies stated that managers who observe suspected harassment “are required to take appropriate steps” and “will be subject to disciplinary action” if they fail to do so. In my appeal, I raised that CEA had not investigated the managers who received the document and did nothing. Their explanation: they wanted to conclude quickly, for my benefit, and felt that investigating themselves would cause delay. They never ran this by me. How convenient that a choice “for my benefit” also meant less scrutiny for them. And what is the point of expediting a determination “for the victim” if the resulting outcomes make her feel as though she must quit.

Same-team assumptions should not be blindly encouraged where power imbalances exist, lest we encourage women into dangerous positions.

5) A harmful misunderstanding of trauma and mitigating vs. aggravating factors.

Some people seemed to believe that my trauma was a mitigating factor in this harassment. That because I was already traumatised by the rape, my reaction was “inflated,” and therefore Riley was somehow less culpable.

I reject this completely. My existing trauma was an aggravating factor. If you know someone is vulnerable and recovering, and then you sexually harass them at their place of work, you are choosing to harm someone with fewer resources to defend themselves. That’s not somehow better. It’s more cruel.

There was a related misunderstanding: that I was incapable of distinguishing between the rape and the harassment. That I was letting everything blur together.

I don’t believe this came from any real evidence, but rather, from other people’s shame and fear. People really don’t like the word rape. As soon as it comes up, they want to distance themselves so utterly that they frame you as over-emotional, unclear, too traumatised. But it’s not my fault that the word rape is necessary to explain the sexual harassment I experienced. That, unfortunately, was a unilateral decision made by Riley.

Let me be clear: I understand the difference between rape and workplace sexual harassment. I’ve got all my nightmares straight, not to worry. That’s why I reported my rapist to the police and filed a separate harassment complaint at work.

And finally: If you ever find yourself defending an action by reminding the victim that it isn’t as bad as a violent felony, it might be time to take a long and reflective walk.

6) I have encountered so many EAs who believe it is easy for victims to speak publicly, or to share their experiences with other community members. And thus, if they aren’t regularly hearing from victims, harassment must be rare.

I’ve repeatedly encountered the harmful notion that it is easy for victims to speak up; that they are immediately rallied behind, celebrated, and believed. This is not true. I was not rallied behind. I had to put in an unspeakable amount of effort for more than a year, and eventually invoke outside legal counsel, to see what I consider basic recognition.

Speaking about the harassment you’ve experienced is devastating. This is one of the reasons sexual abuse is so traumatic; there is the abuse itself and then there is everything that comes after. The cowardice, the inaction, the minimisation, the gaslighting, the complete lack of empathy, the immense ignorance, the never-ending loss of autonomy. For months, I felt voiceless, powerless, and dehumanised over and over.

I have lost count of the number of statements I’ve had to give disclosing that I was raped, disclosing my health, disclosing the sexist comments I endured, all in front of a neutral audience of people I once looked up to. They sat there, took notes, and occasionally threw out an obligatory, “I know this must be hard.” I should never have had to do any of that. But my only other option was to quietly accept the abuse.

The experience of trying to discuss harassment with any random community member isn’t much better. When I write about this topic publicly, I get comments calling me a narcissist, claiming I’m deluded, too sensitive, and clearly manipulative. I am acutely aware that this post is likely to aggravate my harasser, should he read it, and that fact makes me nervous.

I cannot tell you how many women in this community have disclosed harassment to me that they have not reported to Community Health, that I am not allowed to discuss in absolutely any detail, that must be kept confidential. Coming forward sucks. People say incredibly weird things to you. The vast majority of victims will not do it, nor should they ever have to. They will maybe try to seek justice through internal processes, or they will leave. Often, both. Or, they will simply try to continue on. They may try to utilize whisper networks, but such networks face the same cultural issues. In the worst cases, they will rationalise what was done to them and blame themselves.

To any women who have faced something similar

To any victims reading this: I’m so sorry. Many people will never understand how insidious and painful these kinds of experiences truly are. It is so common to hear them minimized. If nothing else, please know that there are many of us who do see the severity. There are many of us who hurt with you. You deserved so much better.

And if I may say one more thing: if you find yourself relaying what you believe to be exceedingly alarming experiences, and the colleagues or people around you appear by and large unperturbed, or they appear deferential, it is not because you are too sensitive. You aren’t missing something. Often, they just aren’t brave enough to look at what’s really happening.

This community, like so many others, appears comfortable with victims absorbing all the costs of failure. They say “we tried our best, sorry!” and then wait for the victim to acquiesce or go away. As my friend said to me: you can stop fighting any time you want. There’s nothing you have to do. But we are so often told that “leaving quietly” is dignified. That it’s more measured. There is nothing dignified or measured about being asked to deny reality and accept abuse.

You do not have to leave quietly. If you want to, go ahead and become an organisation’s biggest problem. If they fail, they should bear some of the cost of that failure.

Thank you to other victims who have written or spoken about their experiences. You have helped me immensely.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the friends and close colleagues who supported me over the past year. Thank you especially to two friends who stepped in and enabled me to self-advocate more effectively, spending hours teaching me about UK law and helping me draft emails. Thank you to my dear roommates for making Oxford a home. Thank you to my future wife for being the most exceptional person I have ever met in my whole entire life. When I didn’t think I could handle it anymore, you joined me on every call. With the board, the investigator, with leadership. You wrote emails, drafted documents, you gathered advice, gathered support, you called me for hours every single day when we were apart. Even when I was scared, you always made sure that I had the chance to speak. All the best things that have happened to me are because of you. I love you.