Eddie Berganza's history of sexual harassment detailed

[Dolores - The Worst Poster Ever]

The article is up.

At DC Comics, An Editor Rose Through The Ranks Even After Being Accused Of Sexual Harassment

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/dc-com...P7w#.rlBeJxXAP

Liz Gehrlein Marsham had been working at DC Comics for less than three weeks when she said a veteran editor named Eddie Berganza cornered her, stuck his tongue in her mouth, and attempted to grope her.

“By the time I left,” Marsham said, “I was really demoralized. I was physically ill from being stressed all the time and trying to hide it. I just felt like I needed to get out, however I could.”

Now, for the first time, three women who say Berganza targeted them in the past have come forward to BuzzFeed News. Five people, including two of those women, confirmed that they spoke to higher-ups at DC about Berganza’s behavior.

We all left, and he’s still there,” said Janelle Asselin, a former DC editor who spearheaded the multi-employee HR complaint against Berganza in 2010. “That, to me, tells me what DC Comics’ priority is.

But Berganza’s editorial skills aren’t all he’s known for in the comics industry. At best, he developed a reputation for making offensive jokes or line-crossing comments in the presence of or at the expense of women; one former staffer recalls hearing Berganza tell a female assistant that a writer needed to make a character in a book they were editing "less dykey." Asselin recalled Berganza once telling her that the reason he didn't hit on her was because he had too much respect for her spouse. But at worst, he’s alleged to have forcibly kissed and attempted to grope female coworkers. One woman said when she started at DC, she was warned about Berganza — advised to keep an eye on him, she said, and to not get drinks with him. "People were constantly warning other people away from him," said Asselin, a vocal critic of gender dynamics in the comics industry.

Berganza's reputation spread throughout the comics industry, so much so that Sophie Campbell, an established writer and artist, turned down an opportunity to work on a Supergirl comic two years ago because Berganza was the editor overseeing the project, even though she wouldn't have had to speak directly to him during the job. It would've been a cool gig, Campbell told BuzzFeed News, but it also "felt scuzzy and scary."

A former DC employee said Berganza’s reputation was "something that I didn't like, but I stomached it. Everybody did. It was a gross open secret."

Marsham had a beer or two and was sitting at the bar when she found herself chatting with Berganza. He had a camera, and when he leaned in for a selfie with Marsham, she says he kissed her on the lips. Marsham was taken aback. When she told Berganza she wasn’t expecting that, he suggested they take another photo, leaned in, and stuck his tongue in her mouth as she chewed on a french fry, Marsham said.

She didn’t know how to react. She recalled blurting out, "There's a fry in my mouth!" When Berganza proposed they kiss again, Marsham said she told him no while laughing awkwardly, still shaken and confused. Berganza walked away. Later in the night, he approached and tried to grope her, she said, one hand reaching for her hip and the other aiming for her side under her breasts. She said she dodged him, and Berganza laughed it off.

Joan Hilty's story uncannily foreshadows Marsham's. In the early 2000s, Hilty said, at a staff get-together at McGee’s, Berganza grabbed her and repeatedly tried to pull her in for a kiss. “I said no — he kept insisting,” said Hilty, at the time a cartoonist and editor at DC in her thirties. She said she eventually snapped, "If you don't take that arm off me, I'm gonna break it."

Berganza’s continued success isn't an anomaly. Women in comics point to a long history of their industry rewarding accused predators while victims are quietly pushed to the margins or blacklisted. By the time Berganza started at DC, editor emeritus and DC Comics "goodwill ambassador" Julius Schwartz had spent decades allegedly groping promising female artists and greeting female colleagues with what former DC employee Heidi MacDonald described as "a big wet kiss on the mouth no matter how much I squirmed away."

"I worried every time we had a new young intern come into the office that was female," Asselin said. "I just became very concerned with what he was going to do next. The more stories I started to hear from other people the more I started to feel this was a compulsion, that he couldn’t stop if he had tried and he wasn’t trying to stop. That scared the **** out of me."

After that conversation, Marsham stopped editing books. She focused instead on scheduling and administrative tasks, effectively removing herself from the creative process. At one point, Marsham met again with Harras, along with the HR director at the time, Debbie Stegman, to discuss editorial assistants. "At that meeting, I said out loud that I could never recommend a woman [assistant] being placed with Eddie," Marsham told BuzzFeed News. Harras and Stegman did not respond to requests for comment.

One former DC employee who spoke to HR about Berganza later said he did so because he thought some professional intervention might stop the editor from misbehaving in the future.

"This never should have happened, but one one would hope after something like this, it wouldn’t happen again," the ex-employee said.

Two years later, it did.

In March 2012, during WonderCon, an annual comics convention in Anaheim, California, Berganza allegedly forcibly kissed another woman at the bar in a Hilton hotel lobby. The woman, then 27, who spoke to BuzzFeed News but asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, was trying to network, hoping to break into the industry by going to her first comics convention. She was there with her boyfriend at the time, a writer who works with DC and who declined to comment.

After Berganza stuck his tongue down her throat, the woman told BuzzFeed News, some people pulled him off of her. She quickly ran up to her hotel room, frightened by what had just happened. She didn't know what she could do about it. She wasn't a DC employee, and more than that, she said, "At the time I was so terrified that this would affect myself or my partner’s prospects in comics, worried it would jeopardize either of our careers." Ultimately, the woman did not report the incident to DC Comics.

Not only does Berganza need to go, but so do his enablers. Warner Bros better clean house.

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On Eddie Berganza and the Misperceptions of Wrongful Dismissal

Since it has now become public knowledge that Buzzfeed will be reporting on the Eddie Berganza situation at DC Comics, and thus might very well cause DC to finally take firm action on Berganza or at least inspire more people to demand action, it feels necessary to discuss one of the most frequently asked questions about Berganza: why couldn’t DC just fire him? It’s actually a pretty easy question to answer: there is no reason why they couldn’t. But over the past five years that Berganza’s behavior has been whispered about in the comics industry, people have nonetheless been convinced that something prohibited DC from firing Eddie Berganza, namely the concept of “wrongful dismissal,” or the idea that it would be legally wrong for DC to fire an employee they had already allegedly officially disciplined.

http://loser-city.com/features/on-ed...ampaign=buffer

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With sexual harassers going down left and right, Berganza might be joining them.

I understand that Group Editor of the Superman comics Eddie Berganza has informed staffers at the DC offices that Buzzfeed is about to publish an expose feature all about him and allegations that have been made against him regarding sexual harassment.

In 2012, Bleeding Cool reported the story that such an incident was alleged to have taken place in a hotel lobby at WonderCon in Anaheim.

I received multiple reports that the subject of the original post was DC Comics then-Executive Editor Eddie Berganza and the woman was a comic book creator in her own right, a partner of a regular DC writer, and an occasional convention reporter for Bleeding Cool.

She did not want to be named back then – she was afraid it might damage her work prospects and wanted to move on, and we respected that. But a few weeks later Bleeding Cool was able to name Eddie Berganza as the man allegedly responsible.

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/11...shing-article/