Screaming and Demeaning, Says Cosimo of Aaron Smith-Levin as a Colleague

TRANSCRIPT:

I thought Aaron was sort of a stuck-up, overconfident, somewhat of a bully, was my first impression when I saw him.

I generally get along with people very easily and I’ll accept almost anyone as my friend or somebody that I’ll work with. And I just found him as a person that I didn’t want to get to know. I didn’t want to befriend him or become his colleague in any way.

The best way I could describe him is like some bodybuilder that had taken too many steroids and had gone a little crazy.

He was always kind of like in this—ready to get into a fight, ready to pick on a person, ready to demean or degrade people that were his colleagues. Usually they were people that were like his juniors, but I even saw him do it with people that were his seniors as well. I frequently saw him bully his direct superior.

There was a meeting that I went to every day. It was at 6:30 p.m. and it was in an office that was shared with him. So usually he was in the office at the same time that I was going to my meeting, although my meeting was not connected with him. And almost every single time I went to that meeting he was on the phone screaming at somebody, yelling at somebody, antagonizing somebody, calling them names.

If I wasn’t directly in the room hearing him yelling, it would be hearing him yelling from down the hallway, sometimes from even a different floor, because it was so resonant and so loud and so outrageous.

Aaron was anything but honest, anything but kind, anything but caring, and I would warn anyone to first of all, not listen to anything he says. Second of all, don’t deal with him unless you enjoy being bullied, beaten up, and put into terror and victimized.