The story behind our Amy Klobuchar scoops

By Nick Baumann and Samantha Storey

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is running for president, she announced Sunday in Minneapolis. But all week, she's been dogged by stories from HuffPost's Molly Redden and Amanda Terkel about how her mistreatment of staff slowed hiring for her 2020 campaign and even provoked a 2015 rebuke from then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). We asked Redden about the stories.

How did these stories come about?

Very quickly when I started to cover working conditions in politics — that's my main beat — several sources told me of friends or co-workers who'd had extraordinarily bad experiences working for Sen. Amy Klobuchar. These were mostly people who worked on Capitol Hill, which is an almost uniformly difficult and demanding place to work. So the fact that Klobuchar's office stood out to them meant something.

At first, very few of her former staffers would speak to us. But that changed as it became clearer she was considering a 2020 White House bid. The past two years have made a... robust... case for a president who can oversee a functioning workplace. So people chose to speak to us, at a serious potential risk to their own careers, because their firsthand experience made them fearful of Klobuchar in that same role.

What was the hardest part about reporting, writing or editing this piece?

On my beat, I run into this one particular problem all the time: Most people working in politics do it because they care about the cause their organization serves, or if they're on the Hill, about the people back home that they represent. So when they have the choice to speak up about mistreatment in the workplace, they often worry as though they're going to hurt a cause or a community they deeply care about.

So take that challenge and then map it onto the Senate — a tiny, insanely insulated world where a person's livelihood relies entirely on their connections and good standing. It's really, really hard to get those people to talk.

Then there's the fact that Klobuchar's been a senator, and has had a pretty negative reputation, for 12 years. And we weren't interested in reporting on the fact that she has this reputation, in people telling us, "Oh yeah, we all told this one joke about Klobuchar's office." It would be a trap to take her reputation as proof that it's factual; there's a lot of lore about her to disregard.

What has the reaction been like?

Really sharply divided. There are countless people who find these stories really disappointing and familiar to their own bad experiences in the workplace. Also, I think half of Washington has heard a Klobuchar story and was curious to see what we substantiated.

On the other hand there are tons of readers who think the coverage is sexist. They're asking us, "How come these stories are never written about men?"

It's just not accurate to say journalists don't report critically on male bosses and leaders who mistreat their staff. And many critics of our coverage and BuzzFeed's are being increasingly selective about which details they choose to see. They say they don't see what's wrong with sending harsh emails, but they're silent on our reports that she throws things at her staff and contrives ways to publicly humiliate them. Is it holding people to high standards to throw binders at them? Is it expecting the best of people to require them to pick up your dirty laundry?

Still, their criticisms are absolutely getting at a larger truth, which is that everyone in the news chain — from the sources to the reporters to the readers — is probably more accommodating of a bad boss who's a man. If you're the employee, maybe you internalize his abuse differently and you don't complain about it as readily. If you're a reporter, maybe those stories don't grab your attention as easily and you don't follow up. And if you're the reader, maybe those stories don't seem as urgent or memorable to you.

To me the clear answer to this problem is more accountability for men who abuse their employees. For me specifically, that means chasing these same stories about men when I hear them. I've already got a list going.

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