RealTime

Aaron Smith-Levin “Was Just Anger, Rage and Hate,” Recounts Colleague

Aaron would “go into a rage,” says former colleague Juliana, who recounts how his response to one disagreement was to dump garbage all over her desk.

TRANSCRIPT:

Aaron Smith-Levin was very hard to follow. You never knew what he was going to do next. You never knew if he was going to blow up and go into a rage. Speaking to him was like walking on eggshells because at any moment you could hit the wrong chord, and then he would explode. All of my staff couldn’t stand him. They wanted him to leave.

He pretended to know how to run things. He pretended to know what to do in an area but factually the area that he was “running” never expanded, nothing went well. And he would rarely come out of his office. And when he did, it would just to be to scream at staff.

You know, I had my—some of the people who worked for me had a meeting in my office, which he happened to share with me. And after the meeting they had left their coffee cups in his garbage can. So his solution was to dump the garbage on my desk, all over my keyboard. That was how he treated that problem, instead of, like, doing something sensible.

One time one of my—one of the girls that worked for me, he was showing her some video, you know, randomly in the middle of the day. And what happened to pop up was a bunch of pornographic material, which he could only have had open on his desktop. So, in the middle of the daytime it appears to be that he would be watching pornographic material instead of doing his actual job.

He would start fights with the other staff. That was the only time that he was ever really involved with anything, was when there was a fight. That was when he would come out of the office, and it had something to do with him, was when there was some kind of conflict.

It just—it almost was like he was making a show just—because he tried to put himself above everybody, when he really didn’t do anything, ever. And he felt that he was above our Church policy, any laws, he didn’t care because he was “better than that,” even though he was not. He didn’t do a lot for the Church when he was here.

People were so relieved to have him go because all he was, was just anger, rage and hate. And so to have that removed from anybody’s life was probably a better thing for all of us.