Rooster Teeth issued an open statement of apology for “hateful and hurtful” conduct toward employees over the years, coming after a former staff member detailed her experiences of being harassed, underpaid and marginalized at the company.
The company, the fandom/gaming/sci-fi entertainment division of Warner Bros. Discovery, responded this past weekend to the allegations — but had not explicitly apologized. “As a company, we sincerely apologize for the hateful and harmful behavior that occurred in the past. We must do better. We are sorry,” Rooster Teeth wrote in a Twitter thread Tuesday evening.
“Hate and mistreatment have no place here,” the company said. “We’ve been committed to change to avoid repetition and to remain accountable” RT added that it has encouraged staff to reach out directly to its HR department or use its internal anonymous reporting tool to flag problems.
Amid the controversy, Rooster Teeth said it is “reducing RT programming and content this week. We’re taking time to reconnect with one another. We’ll be back to making content next week.” The company also said, “Do not harass any RT staff. Many of them are actively working to make Rooster Teeth a better place.”
In an Oct. 15 blog post, Kdin Jenzen, who worked at Rooster Teeth from 2013 until she quit earlier this year, said she was harassed by coworkers and managers for years, including being called by the nickname “Fggt” — and that, after she came as out trans in 2016, the mistreatment grew worse. She said she reported the problems to HR but that no action was taken. Jenzen, who uses she/they pronouns, was a producer and director who mainly worked in the company’s Achievement Hunter games group.
Jenzen also said they were unpaid for voiceover work they did from February to November 2013 while at RT, including voicing May Marigold for the company’s “RWBY” anime-style series, and said she was grossly underpaid as an employee. Until the end of 2020, Jenzen said, they were paid around $40,000 per year as a producer/director, which was almost $30,000 less than “the lowest-paid person next to me.”
On Tuesday, Rooster Teeth said, “Upon investigation, we confirmed Kdin’s work was paid in full according to our agreements. We will honor our agreements and address any outstanding payments.” That said, according to the company, “We recognized past low wages and implemented tools to ensure continued pay equity, including paid internships and paid overtime.”
Rooster Teeth’s Oct. 16 statement said, “Many individuals at Rooster Teeth acknowledged personal responsibility for their actions both internally and externally.” The included co-founder Geoff Ramsey, who shared a long message on Twitter apologizing to Jenzen. “The long and short of it is that I fucking sucked,” Ramsey wrote. “I was a shitty, self-loathing poor excuse for a ‘comedian,’ who only knew how to express myself by externalizing that feeling under the guise of edgy comedy.” Ramsey said he had apologized privately to Jenzen in 2016 and 2020.
In addition, Jenzen said she worked extremely long hours at Rooster Teeth, routinely from 7 a.m.-11 p.m. and even longer during the COVID pandemic. The company responded that “we have gone to great lengths to minimize crunch, especially in animation,” saying it had “removed previous management, are actively implementing key hires across the company, and have integrated management training to develop better schedules and practices.”
Rooster Teeth has been led by GM Jordan Levin, a veteran of the TV industry, since September 2019. The company said that in 2020, it put an entirely new HR team, upper management and corporate oversight in place, which “allowed us to immediately investigate the claims made over the last few days.”
Among other steps the company said it has taken, in early 2021 it established six business resource groups (BRGs) “to inspire change within our culture” as part of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Leadership of the BRGs was initially unpaid; this summer, Rooster Teeth “implemented a compensation plan for this essential work.”
Meanwhile, Janzen issued an apology herself this week, after an old video surfaced in which she used the N-word and making racist comments, according to users on Reddit.
Janzen, after apologizing for using the racial slur in a tweet Monday, posted a longer apology the next day. “I am fully aware that my past behavior and words, were egregious, and to some, including myself unforgivable,” she wrote. “I rushed my apology in my shame and have felt the weight of who I used to be for so long, that I needed time to process seeing myself like that again and then how I could address everyone.”
Jenzen continued, “I’ve tried my best to help and strengthen my BIPOC coworkers at Rooster Teeth, supported them in every way I could, and reported and called out every bit of misconduct.”
According to her latest blog post, “The final straw for me working at Rooster Teeth was this year when one of the highest people at the company chose to yell at our Black employees for ‘putting on a lackluster show’ during [Black Heritage Month].” Jenzen, who did not identify the exec, said she called him out for his and the company’s “lack of support for the Black Excellence BRG as well as every other BRG,” whereupon the manager then “doubled down and blamed the BRGs for everything, despite all the hard work from every Black, AAPI, Hispanic/Latin, Queer, and female (non-management level) employee[s] at the company doing everything they could to make active change.”
On Wednesday, Nikki Miles, a senior HR specialist at Rooster Teeth, posted a statement on behalf of the company’s Black Excellence BRG that disputed Jenzen’s version of events at the internal meeting.
“I left that post-mortem feeling like the conversation was controlled by people who were barely even a part of the process, which left me feeling worse,” Mile wrote. “That said, no one yelled at any of us or called our stream lackluster. While we will always appreciate an ally using their voice to amplify ours, which Kdin did do during our post mortem, she was not the only one to speak up for us.”
Miles continued, “By Kdin attempting to defend herself using this anecdote, she left us feeling infantilized, ridiculed and used. We were not gaslit and pressured to do more work. We have made the choice to pull back in a lot of ways, because we just don’t have the bandwidth to do everything we want to.”
