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Firstly I want to thank everyone who spoke to me and shared their traumatic experiences with Peter Meehan, who is editor of @latimesfood and well-protected by two powerful people @latimes.
It doesn’t give me pleasure to do this unless the person actually gets fired. It just never fails to disturb me how useless HR departments are when it comes to handling people’s very serious workplace issues. And @latimes has a union!
There have been multiple HR complaints about Peter Meehan @latimes, but it’s hard to believe any were investigated since I have been able to compile a mountain of testimonies in just a couple days from people who have worked with him and known him over the past decade.
This is only scratching the surface:
There can’t have been much of a background check @latimes for Peter Meehan’s current position as editor @latimesfood, for which he gets paid $300k—not including perks such as an expense account and getting to live in NYC despite being the editor of @latimesfood….
Maybe @latimes hr doesn’t care much because Peter Meehan literally does not live in LA. Before the pandemic @latimes was flying him out for a week every month for a week of spendy dining and pretending to work.
Peter Meehan has a very poor understanding of LA geography, food, and culture. He is widely disliked throughout @latimes, but is hailed as a hip genius by his cliquey sycophants.
If I were the @latimes, I would start by talking to every woman of color that has worked under Peter Meehan.
There is a really gross irony about the fact that while in charge of Lucky Peach, getting to write books about Asian food, he abused most (all?) of his Asian female employees with everything from belittling and berating them to physical intimidation *just* short of assault.
They were also underpaid while Peter Meehan inflated his salary. ($200k at Lucky Peach)
Peter Meehan has no boundaries in the workplace. Some female employees were sexually harassed, and there were several reports that he had a relationship with a subordinate while at Lucky Peach. In the Lucky Peach office he slapped a woman’s ass.
Peter Meehan’s verbal abuse to his employees and others is crafted and deranged. He is known for threatening people with baroque forms of violence, if not straight up calling someone a piece of shit directly.
Peter Meehan is known to call his employees late at night just to have freak outs about petty issues or to be incredibly needy.
A lot of people have described knowing Peter Meehan before working with him and being shocked at his change into an abusive, angry man in the workplace.
Management @latimes repeatedly protects Peter Meehan and comes to his defense, but if you work with him you know he can’t keep an editorial calendar, needs a lot of hand-holding to get work done, and thinks 24/7 supervision over slack is a sufficient form of leadership.
Peter Meehan offloads most of his work @latimesfood and never takes responsibility for anything.
Peter Meehan refused to publish anything about Juneteenth @latimesfood until he was forced to by upper management, and otherwise doesn’t reach out to journalists of color unless it is to tokenize them.
“He is unfit for real journalism.”
I don’t know which famous chef this refers to, but Peter Meehan called her “fuckable”... why is Peter Meehan in charge of @latimesfood and making $300k while living in NYC?
Sorry I don’t have a smoking gun here, but if you have a picture of Peter Meehan dressed as another race for Halloween, my dms are open. I hope it doesn’t take something as dumb as that for @latimes to reconsider his employment when he is already a known abuser.
Obviously people are unable to speak because they don’t want to ruin their jobs or careers, but this is unacceptable. There are people who will go on the record if any journalists want to investigate further, LMK
