Mic published an article Wednesday that included testimony from an anonymous female employee at Apple claiming the tech company was a toxic work environment. The first evidence of such accusation the source “Danielle” provided was that her male coworkers were “publicly joking about rape.”
But the Mic article conveniently left out the actual rape joke: the hugely popular “Bed Intruder Song” (100 million+ views on YouTube).
Gizmodo obtained the chat logs of the conservation between Danielle and her coworkers. Reading them, you can see her coworkers were laughing about the “hide yo kids, hide yo wife” line, which severely offended Danielle. She asked them to stop making jokes regarding a song about sexual assault and told them their behavior was creating a toxic work environment. Her coworkers profusely apologized, but that was not enough for Danielle.
She emailed Apple’s CEO Tim Cook directly stating she felt incredibly unsafe at Apple, as she had been a sexual assault survivor in the past and found the joking unacceptable.
As a result of the letter she was given a month off work for, in her words, “PTSD triggering.”
The Mic article contains other incidents of more serious sexism in the workplace, but were clearly using the “rape joke” incident as the signature incident in the story.