Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg will release three women who registered complaints about him from their nondisclosure agreements in a striking victory for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has been pressing the issue.
“I’ve had the company go back over its record and they’ve identified 3 NDAs that we signed over the past 30-plus years with women to address complaints about comments they said I had made,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “If any of them want to be released from their NDA so that they can talk about those allegations, they should contact the company and they’ll be given a release.”
“I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this issue over the past few days and I’ve decided that for as long as I’m running the company, we won’t offer confidentiality agreements to resolve claims of sexual harassment or misconduct going forward,” he added.
He also promised to institute cultural changes at his company, along with structural ones in the form of equal pay and family leave.
Warren identified the NDAs as a Bloomberg weak point and went to town during the Nevada debate, challenging him to release all of his former employees from their non-disclosure agreements. She even wrote up a text for him to use. Her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the debate, Bloomberg would not promise to free the employees from what he called their “consensual” agreements and cited statistics about women in leadership at his company in response. His dismissal of “jokes” he may have made elicited boos from the debate audience.
