Last night, at approximately 2AM ET, a former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, accusing Linus Media Group of cultivating a toxic work environment and encouraging a work culture that was detrimental to her health as well as sexual harassment directed at her by Linus Media Group employees.
“I chose to quit my role at LTT because it, and the working environment I was facing, were ruining my mental health,” her statement begins. “My work was called ‘dogshit’ I was called ‘incompetent’. When I would reach out to managers and try to get help with these situations, I would be told to ‘put on my big girl pants’ and be ‘more assertive’.”
Reeve went on to accuse the company of barring her from videos after she reported being “grabbed multiple times in the office” and being told to “calm my tits” and “stop being such a bitch.”
Madisons’ thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741.html
(Content warning: self harm)
You should see the WAN Show, their podcast. His co-host always looks nervous to say anything out of turn, they basically just read the next topic that Linus wants to talk about.
Or the time where Linus almost took Jake’s fingers out with a hole saw trying to drill holes in a RUNNING PC. Man’s a workplace hazard in more ways than one.
Trust me, you weren’t missing much.
As someone who watches the WAN show semi-regularly, I do not get the same vibe from their relationship as you do
I am a semi-frequent WAN show watcher and I definitely get that vibe. Some people will say that Luke stands up to Linus, but from what I’ve seen it’s only superficial. I have never seen him push Linus enough that it becomes a real disagreement–not on an actual controversy like this, at least. The WAN show where they discussed the Billet Labs review is a perfect example: Luke says “well, maybe we should have re-tested” but then Linus goes off on his “$500 of employee time” tangent and Luke doesn’t call that out as completely ridiculous and hypocritical.
He does voice his disagreement, but not in a way that is going to change anything.
I wasn’t just talking about Luke, sometimes other folks stand in. Though yes Luke is most often the co-host, the show is structured such that Linus does a vast majority of the talking regardless of who else is there. Even Dan in the audio booth just curates and reads questions from chat.
Dang, what a menace! People will tolerate all kinds of abuse if they have an otherwise cool job. You see it all the time in sports and entertainment.