Co-worker Julie Describes Aaron Smith-Levin’s Bullying Behavior

TRANSCRIPT:

I worked with Aaron Smith-Levin for a few years. He was an extremely antagonistic, angry person; picked a lot of fights, a lot of unnecessary fights. Generally wasn’t somebody you would want to spend time with, be in a room with for a long time, anything like that.

But there wasn’t any actual working going on with him ever that I ever saw. He spent a lot of time sitting in his office, not working. And then would—when people came in who were working, he would pick fights with them, you know. And the fights were—as, you know, as I said they were silly—they were, they were, you’re sitting at his desk and he just decided when he walked in that you should get up and you weren’t immediately getting up, or you left something on his desk or you talked to him wrongly or something like that, it was very small stuff.

I was sitting in his office, you know, it was a shared office between a number of us. We share desks depending on schedules. So I was sitting in his office—had done hours of work putting together something, you know, figures, you know. And it was spread out across the desk, granted. I walked out of the office for a minute, came back in and he had decided to use his desk. So he crumpled up everything that I had laid out and spent hours putting together, threw it on the floor and had sat down at the desk. When I walked in the room—didn’t acknowledge my existence walking into the room, you know. It was a definite anger. You know, I got upset obviously that all of my work had been undone, crumpled up and thrown on the floor. And completely dismissive, rude—just, you know, entirely destructive, with no purpose.

He was in a meeting with an elderly gentleman who was talking to him about something, not actually even offensive, and he took offense to it and leapt at the man. I know he definitely connected, hit him a few times or something like that. And then there was another—another time, three to four people jump on him—have to pull him off, drag him out of the room. And again, it was a silly thing, it wasn’t—whatever the person had said wasn’t offensive. I wasn’t offended by it. Nobody else in the room was offended by it.

He definitely used his size and position to bully people. He would use overwhelming quantities of force and anger—which, you know, people don’t really like to confront, they don’t like to deal with, they would rather avoid—to force his way on issues, or force what he wanted to have happen or you out of his space, or frankly not confront him on something that he didn’t want to be confronted on, such as not working or those kind of things. He would use a lot of force, use his physical size, use his, you know, these kind of things to get you away from him. Yeah. So, definitely a bully.