My take was that the board, not JD, took direct control and fired both, there is documentary evidence of such. They offered to let them work at least temporarily as 1099 employees while they investigated and figured out what to do. Maybe JD machinated this in the background, but there has been no evidence or speculation that he was pulling the strings. Indeed given who was on the board I doubt they would have let him. The board was going to keep them separate and let them both fulfill the parts of the mission of Open Stories Foundation that they were doing. Rosebud for good and for bad rejected it and still wanted JD to oust the board instead so they could take the reins. She also felt that her in-person conferences were of more impact than the podcast, so between the two she better fulfilled the purpose of Open Stories Foundation. Even though financially and actual raw numbers the podcast was having the bigger impact and attracting sustainable donations. You can cherry-pick where Rosebud was cold and JD was hot, but to the best of my recollections there were times that the roles were switched and JD was cold and Rosebud was hot.Physics Guy wrote: ↑Wed Sep 13, 2023 12:21 pmI only had a late and peripheral interest in the great thread, but I took away a point from Marcus that was new to me. The worst part of Dehlin's behavior from a professional point of view was something that one could easily overlook (at least I did) because it doesn't fit the trope of the leering boss pressuring an underling for intimacy. He got someone fired because it made him uncomfortable to be around them, because of his (at that point) former romantic relationship with them.
In one way, that's the opposite of firing someone because you can't have sex with them: it's firing them so that you can't have sex with them. If the only moral issue you're noticing is the boss's chastity, then you give this boss high marks for being a paladin of virtue. This is the part of the story where Dehlin was repenting, the lingering Mormon judgement might say; this is the part where he finally started doing the right thing. No, wrong.
What Marcus pointed out is that firing someone to remove their temptation from your life is still hurting someone in order to make your sex life more to your own liking. The fact that what you're wanting is marital fidelity is completely irrelevant to the issue of sexual harassment. People can have all kinds of sexual preferences; as far as the harassment issue is concerned, a preference for not being tempted to adultery is no different from a foot fetish.
As long as the employee is actually behaving professionally, a boss can't cause them professional hardship just because of the boss's own romantic or sexual feelings about them—regardless of the precise nature of those feelings. Sexual harassment is a separate issue from the boss's sexual virtue, and sexual harassment can be just as wrong, professionally, even if the perpetrator is a paragon of chastity. To clarify this point by showing it in an extreme case, consider a violent dictator who maintains their marriage vows by having every tempting underling executed. The commitment to marriage does not mitigate the mass murder one bit.
At the end of the day, there was a power differential and so ultimately JD falls under sexual harassing a subordinate, but legally Open Stories Foundation was too small for it to be legally actionable just based on boss/employee roles. JD has certainly suffered, and you or I may not think it was enough, certainly KK and others do not. Ironically just to refresh, Rosebud was complaining about JD and RFM doxxing her, but it was KK and the midnight Mormons, the questionable allies she got in bed with, that doxxed her. JD and RFM were both abiding by leaving it alone and only referring to her as Rosebud until MM and KK kicked up the hornets nest last time.
TL;DR Rosebud's "allies" outed her, she refused the temporary arrangements that were meted out on both her and JD while they conducted their investigation and came to a decision, she quit Open Stories Foundation when JD wouldn't join in a coup against the board, and when she was no longer involved in Open Stories Foundation the board no longer had a situation to resolve between employees/contractors and rehired JD. There is no evidence that JD got Rosebud fired other than he participated in an emotional affair with her and when he ended it she took it badly.