It's a staple on TCM and for some reason a must watch if you can't sleep, are channel surfing at 2:00 am and run across it: Becket. Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole as Thomas Becket and Henry II, best of friends until Henry makes the history-altering mistake of appointing Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. In short order, Becket becomes the 12th Century equivalent of a social media warrior, trolling Henry's edicts when isn’t blocking them.
Henry II, Thomas Becket, and the Order Nobody Gave
Stick around to the wee hours and you're treated to a disgusted Peter O'Toole looking out over a banquet room and a group of his heavily armed, heavily drinking knights and wondering aloud, “Will no one here rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
Spoiler alert: the heavily armed, heavily lubricated knights ride to Canterbury Cathedral and stab Richard Burton's meddlesome priest to death. Henry would immediately disavow knowledge of everything short of knowing Becket.
Three years, six months after now Saint Thomas Becket’s death, Henry walked three miles, barefoot, to Canterbury Cathedral, where he knelt naked but for a hairshirt by Becket’s tomb and became the only English king to receive a public flogging. The movie ends there, though O'Toole, nominated for a best actor Oscar would go on to play Henry II again in The Lion in Winter (and be nominated for best actor yet again). Sure proof that Henry II did just fine after Becket's death.
eBay’s CEO and the Website He Wanted Gone
Give or take eight hundred and fifty years later, Devin Wenig, the CEO of eBay, was exasperated with Ina and David Steiner. They ran a website out of their house in Natick, Massachusetts, called EcommerceBytes, which covered online selling businesses. Most of their readers were the small sellers who make up eBay’s actual business and had no problem sharing their opinions about eBay’s leadership, especially as eBay upped fees and cut their sales margins.
In April 2019, Ina ran a piece headlined “eBay CEO Devin Wenig Earns 152 Times That of Employees." It really bothered Wenig, who had been complaining to his communications team about the site since 2018.
He wrote to his Chief Communications Officer, Steve Wymer: "take her down.” In August he texted, "If we are ever going to take her down… now is the time."
The eBay Stalking Campaign: Spiders, Cockroaches, and a GPS Tracker
Meanwhile, Wymer roamed the eBay hallways telling employees that the CEO wanted to “eff with her;" "blow her site up;" and the company should "clap back at Ina." One of those employees was Jim Baugh, a former CIA employee (I picture him as John Malkovich’s character in Burn After Reading) running eBay’s Global Security Unit.
The Steiners started getting threats from anonymous Twitter accounts. Then they started getting disturbing deliveries: live spiders, live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask of the kind worn by the Saw killer. On August 15, 2019, Baugh and several of his employees flew to Boston, tried to fix a GPS tracker to the Steiners' car, and followed David around Natick. David wrote down the rental car's plate number and handed it to the police, which is where the whole thing fell apart.
Who Went to Prison and Who Paid: The eBay Settlement
Seven eBay employees pleaded guilty to federal charges. Four went to prison; Baugh got 57 months (now he can write his memoirs). eBay paid the government $3 million. You will be shocked to hear that no executive was charged with anything.
Wenig, fired from eBay in 2019 with $57 million in walking money, maintained that he knew nothing, that the campaign was run in secret and without his knowledge and that "take her down" referred to a publicity strategy.
The Steiners sued in 2021, and just over a month ago, the case settled for $55.7 million. eBay pays $46.15 million. Wenig pays $2 million of his own money and donates another million to a First Amendment charity in Ina Steiner's name. Jones pays $500,000. Wymer, the man who wrote "blow her site up," pays $50,000. There is no confidentiality clause, which is unusual, and eBay agreed to issue what the Steiners' lawyer called "a strongly-worded public statement" about its former executives. That’s as close as we get to a public flogging these days.
The Lesson for Business Owners: You Answer for What Your Employees Hear
Henry asked a question of a room full of drunks and let the room fill in the rest. Wenig made his feelings known to a home office populated by the kind of people who would think of sending a bloody pig mask to someone.
So here’s lesson almost a thousand years in the making: A CEO or business owner is responsible for what they say when their employees take it as a request/order/suggestion and run with it. The company took the brunt of the punishment, eBay’s $46.15 million is a direct result of a “careless” CEO venting to an employee who he had to know would take it to the psychopath down the hallway bored out of his mind chasing down $14.95 fraud claims.
In Litigation, the Documents Tell the Story
Notice, too, where Wenig's own $2 million came from. He never went anywhere near Natick. He just wrote "take her down," with a date attached. In litigation the documents tell the story, whatever you meant by them. And you don't need a Global Security Unit for this to happen to you. Every closely held company has its own version: the loyal manager, the operations guy, the nephew who heard you grumble over lunch about a competitor, a former partner, or an ex-employee and decided to take care of it for you.
What This Means for Texas Business Owners
Texas law has been dealing with Henry’s problem for a long time. A company answers for what its employees do in the course and scope of their jobs, and that is before anyone asks what the owner knew or meant. When an employee’s conduct crosses into the criminal, Section 41.005 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code allows exemplary damages against the employer in a short list of situations, including where the employer authorized the act, where the employee was a manager acting within the scope of the job, and where the employer or one of its managers ratified or approved it afterward.
Nothing in that statute requires a signed memo. Authorization and approval get proven the way everything gets proven in a business case: with the emails, the texts, and the testimony of the people who received them. We have said it before in The Real Truths of Business Law, “If your business decisions are not documented and a dispute arises, they never happened.” The reverse holds too. What you did put in writing happened, and it happened the way the other side’s lawyer says it did until you prove otherwise.
A closely held company has even less room than eBay did. There is no communications department and no Global Security Unit between you and the people who act on what you say. The manager who heard you grumble is, in the eyes of the law, a manager. The text you sent at eleven at night about the former partner who is now calling your customers will read very differently as Exhibit 14, after that manager has done something about it.
None of this means you cannot be furious at a competitor, a former partner, or the ex-employee who walked out with your customer list. It means the fury goes to your lawyer and not to your staff. There are lawful ways to deal with someone who is hurting your business, among them a demand letter, an injunction, a suit to enforce a non-compete, a tortious interference claim, and a defamation claim when what is being said is actually false. All of them are slower and less satisfying than the nephew’s idea. All of them also end with you as the plaintiff and not the defendant.
And if you learn that someone has already “taken care of it,” that is the day to call counsel. Saying nothing is one of the ways a jury gets to “ratified,” and deleting the thread is spoliation, which is a separate problem.
Talk to Hopkins Centrich Before Someone Takes Care of It for You
If a dispute with a competitor, a former partner, or a former employee is heating up, or if something has already been said or done inside your company that you wish had not been, contact us. The earlier you do so, the better, there are deadlines for every legal action. The longer you wait, the fewer your legal options.
About Hopkins Centrich
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