update: my new manager is someone I slept with years ago … and he doesn’t know we have a child

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose new manager was someone she slept with years ago … and he didn’t know they have a child together? Here’s the update.

Thank you for answering my letter. You were right, it was a really big deal. I was viewing the Jacob-as-my-manager problem from his perspective — until I told him otherwise, it was just a simple one night stand over a decade ago — and it didn’t seem like a huge problem. I hated and appreciated the reality check. I regret reading the comments, but thank you also for moderating them as quickly as you did.

A lot happened in a short space of time (thankfully I already had a therapist!). First, I spoke to my union rep who said, “Say NOTHING but call us if HR tries to set up a meeting with you.” Staying silent and having Jacob independently declare the prior relationship when he arrived would have been problematic because I’d still end up in the same position and I would have lied by omission. Our HR team can be gossipy and they know the age of my half-Chinese daughter, so I needed to have as much control as possible over the disclosure. I spoke to an employment lawyer who reviewed our policies and, at his suggestion, I wrote an email to HR declaring a prior relationship with Jacob.

And then I was immediately pushed out. Even if you have all the legal support in the world, you can’t prevent someone from doing something illegal, you just have recourse afterwards. In a meeting with my lawyer, the union rep, HR, and a member of the senior management team, I was asked to resign. When I said no, they insisted on a statutory declaration about the relationship with Jacob stating what happened, when it happened, how many times it happened (??) and who initiated it (??). I also said no to that. We ended the meeting with each side agreeing to think about possible solutions.

The company’s solution was to start messing with my pay, my benefits, my swipe card access to my office, my computer log in, and my email/calendar account. They spread rumors about me and I heard coworkers whispering that I’d had an affair with a manager. They sent me for a “random” drug test at a time when I was scheduled for an important meeting with clients. They cancelled accommodation that had been booked for upcoming travel, which I only found out about because I was getting paranoid and called the hotel.

I can’t describe how awful it feels to know that someone with this kind of power over your job is devoting their time and energy to thinking of ways to screw with you. Every day I was going into work wondering what was waiting for me and it was wearing me down fast. The advice from the union rep was to go back in time and follow their first piece of advice, or just keep documenting everything as we prepared to take legal action. The lawyer estimated that it would take at least a year to get any kind of resolution, and I didn’t even want the job anymore. By this point, I wasn’t sleeping much and I had cried a few times at work. I was beginning to crack and we were only just getting started.

So, I resigned. I wish I’d held up better under the pressure but it was all just too much with the looming deadline of Jacob’s start date at our office, and whatever way HR was going to drag him into this. I’m lucky that I can take my time looking for a new job, so I’ve had some space to process everything.

Outside of the work stuff, I spoke with a family lawyer who outlined all the possible ways this situation could go, and what the most likely outcomes were. Basically, my daughter is old enough that what she wants would get heavily weighted by a court if it came to that. I have spoken to my daughter many times about her father. I told her what I knew about him and that I had tried to contact him. I’ve offered for her to see a therapist if she ever wanted to talk about it with someone who wasn’t me, and she has always said “thanks, but no thanks.”

The family lawyer helped me write a letter which I left for Jacob. I told him about his daughter, said I wasn’t trying to get anything from him, and gave him the contact details of my lawyer. After a few weeks (of me freaking out that HR had somehow intercepted the letter), he emailed my lawyer. He was the easy-going and practical Jacob I remembered. He was still processing it but said he wasn’t going to take any legal steps, he offered us his family medical history, he apologized if I resigned because of him, and he said he would like to meet our daughter if she’s interested. She also has some siblings. I told her all this, she said she’s happy that she has her father’s contact info but she doesn’t want to meet him right now. She’s of the view that having him in our lives would cause unwanted disruption. And she doesn’t even know about the work clusterfudge.