sfgate.com / June 15th, 2010
Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman was involved in a confrontation in 2007 with an employee who was preparing eBay's then-CEO for a media interview, a confrontation that cost the San Jose online auction site a six-figure settlement, according to published reports.
The employee, Young Mi Kim, returned to work at eBay four months after the incident and continues to work for the company as a senior manager for corporate and executive communications, according to the New York Times, which first reported the story Monday.
After both parties attended a supervised mediation process in San Francisco, they reached a settlement believed to be "around $200,000" according to the newspaper. Kim was not injured and the police were not involved. "Yes, we had an unfortunate incident, but we resolved it in a way that speaks well for her and for eBay," Kim wrote to the Times in an e-mail Monday. "And ultimately, I came back to the company, which is not something I had to do."
On June 1, 2007, Kim was in an eBay conference room helping the CEO prepare for an interview with Reuters about Second Life, an online virtual world, the newspaper said.
The story said Whitman grew frustrated because she wasn't adequately prepared for the interview. Because there are believed to be no other witnesses to the eBay incident, according to the Times, the range of ensuing confrontation ranges from Whitman "physically guiding" Kim out of the room to Whitman using an expletive and shoving her.Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/BALT1DV3SV.DTL#ixzz0r9uLsiLbAnd here:
sfgate.com / Business Insider, June 16th, 2010
We think California voters have a right to understand exactly what happened in the "shoving incident" reported yesterday.
In this incident, eBay CEO, Meg Whitman reportedly berated her PR person for being unprepared for a meeting and then, depending on who is describing the events, either "shoved" or "physically guided" her from the room.
The incident was serious enough that eBay or Meg (reportedly eBay) later paid the employee ~$200,000 to make the incident go away.
Now, it's possible that the employee, Young Mi Kim, WAS unprepared for the meeting, and in the interests of defending herself and re-directing the blame, exaggerated or made up what happened.
But given the size of the settlement, it's also possible that Meg snapped.Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/16/businessinsider-here-are-our-questions-for-meg-whitman-about-the-shoving-incident-2010-6.DTL#ixzz0r9ulacyG