(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In March 2020, Jennifer Sey found herself trapped at home with a husband, four children, a dining room table converted into a makeshift office, and no idea how the Covid-19 pandemic would unfold or when it would end. So she started posting on social media. A lot.
Sey lived in San Francisco, one of the first cities in the U.S. to issue a shelter-in-place order. Her eldest son from a previous marriage returned from the University of California at Berkeley, which had closed its campus. His brother, then a high school junior, was marooned at home, too. Sey's husband, Daniel Kotzin, an attorney-turned-stay-at-home dad, took care of their two youngest, then 5 and 3. “We were trying to manage, all of us in an apartment,” Sey recalled. “It just felt completely absurd.”
Sey attempted to maintain some semblance of normalcy. She dressed for work every morning, putting on shoes even though she was no longer going into the office. Although their 3,000-square-foot, two-story, four-bedroom condominium was bigger than most in San Francisco, it didn't have a backyard. Kotzin kept taking his kids to shuttered playgrounds. They'd play until the cops came and kicked them out.
Aside from Kotzin's low-grade civil disobedience, he and Sey endured the early weeks of the pandemic more or less the same as everybody else. They followed the news obsessively and were particularly heartened by a survey of 105 Covid patients in Italy which found that, at the time, the median age of death from the virus was 81. No one under 18 in Italy had died yet either, which seemed like good news, too. So why, Sey wondered, were schools and playgrounds closed? They should reopen immediately, she thought. She vented her frustrations on Facebook.
This didn't go over well with her friends and family, who pointed out that this new and not yet fully understood virus was killing thousands of people with no end in sight. “I realized Facebook was unproductive rather quickly,” she says. “But I couldn't help myself. I needed to talk it through.” She switched to Twitter.
Before the pandemic, Sey used Twitter only occasionally. Her followers were mostly fellow gymnastics fans who knew her either as the 1986 women's all-around national champion or as the author of Chalked Up, her 2008 memoir about the physical and emotional abuse she'd endured as a gymnast. Now Sey was tweeting several times a day. She fretted about rising unemployment. She shared a Mother Jones article about cases of child abuse going unreported because teachers, often the first to notice something wrong, were no longer with children in school. A month into the pandemic, she was calling for the country to return to normal.
“We just need to open up and learn to deal,” she tweeted on April 25. “We can't live this way forever.” She veered between the thoughtful—“We have to weigh the impacts of kids missing a semester, a year etc of education vs risks to other populations from covid”—and inflammatory falsehoods: “School age children [are] more likely to be hit by lightning than die of coronavirus.” By May 28: “Science is being used as a smokescreen.”
Kotzin, also on Twitter, was more combative. Sometimes he'd get into fights, and Sey would jump to his defense. “People were calling me horrible names,” Sey says. “Like, ‘You're obviously a racist.' ” But over time, she connected with like-minded people, many of them parents frustrated by remote learning. Sey's follower count started to rise.
The months, and tweets, flew by. “Masking a 2 year old asserts that babies are dangerous and to be feared.” “I would not volunteer my kids [for vaccine trials] knowing that they are at virtually no risk if they do get Covid without a vaccine.” Anthony Fauci, she wrote, “promised an AIDS vaccine in '87. I think we're still waiting.”
Her tweets would have passed unnoticed, gossip fodder among her friends and relatives, except for one thing: She was chief marketing officer of Levi Strauss & Co., the 169-year-old, $6 billion publicly traded company that had 16,600 employees and whose blue jeans, Dockers khakis, and other apparel were sold in more than 50,000 stores in 110 countries around the world. At the company's headquarters in San Francisco, Sey was the chief architect of the brand's image, overseeing hundreds of people. Some of her colleagues—eventually, including Chief Executive Officer Chip Bergh—were not happy about what their CMO was saying on Twitter.
The idea that an executive at Levi's would publicly speak her mind isn't out of the ordinary at the company. Levi Strauss & Co. started in 1853 as a dry goods store that catered to cowboys and fortune seekers lured to California during the gold rush—people who lived on the fringes of respectable society. In 1934 it became the first company to design jeans for women, even though it wasn't acceptable for women to wear pants in public at the time. The company started racially integrating its factories in the 1940s, long before it was legally required, and in 1992 it became the first Fortune 500 company to extend benefits to employees' same-sex partners.
For a long time, Levi's progressive stances were known internally but rarely publicized. “We'd been very hesitant to say anything publicly,” Sey says. “It felt a little too chest-pounding and almost gauche.” But as consumption became an increasingly political act, to the point where the type of car a person drove or where they bought their clothes was seen as an extension of their values and beliefs, staying silent became a problem. Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's had long worn their progressive ideals on their sleeve, while Delta and Dick's Sporting Goods had more recently found there was upside in joining the political conversation. “Consumers wanted to know what you stood for,” Sey says. “They wanted to choose brands that represented their values.” So under CEO Bergh, who joined the company from Procter & Gamble Co. in 2011, Levi's became more outspoken in its beliefs.
Understanding when to deploy its political muscle is a hard thing for a company to get right. Last year the Coca-Cola Co. managed to irritate almost everyone when it spoke out against Georgia's new voting law: Republicans were angry that Coke opposed their voting restrictions, and Democrats considered the move hypocritical because the company had made campaign contributions to several of the bill's sponsors. More recently Walt Disney Co. has found itself fumbling in Florida, when Disney employees shamed executives for staying silent on the state's ban on discussing sexual orientation in early elementary grades, prompting Disney to finally condemn the law. (Incensed Florida lawmakers then voted to strip the “woke” corporation, as Governor Ron DeSantis described Disney, of its decades-long special taxing district). “It's not just a question of knowing what your consumers care about, it's also about understanding whether they expect you to take a position,” says Anthony Johndrow, co-founder of Reputation Economy Advisors, a consulting firm.
Levi's approach was to stick to issues it already knew. The company had enjoyed a close relationship with the LGBTQ community for decades. In 1982 its philanthropic arm, the Levi Strauss Foundation, donated to the San Francisco clinic that was treating the country's first AIDS patients. A decade later it stopped supporting the Boy Scouts of America after the organization refused to accept gay scouts and scoutmasters. So its first forays into politics seemed a natural fit: In 2015, Levi's signed a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief in support of marriage equality, and it has since signed another in support of transgender rights. In 2016, after a customer in an open-carry state accidentally fired his gun while trying on clothes in a Levi's store, injuring himself and scaring employees, Bergh asked customers not to bring guns into Levi's stores. Two years later, after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the company publicly called for stricter gun control laws. (The foundation also partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety, founded by Michael Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg Businessweek.)
Each time Levi's hitched itself to an issue, it incurred at least some backlash. After its gun control announcement, the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project crashed a shareholder meeting to tell Bergh that the company was becoming “a muscle for fringe politics.” But no criticism was so widespread that it noticeably affected company sales.
Levi's also opposed many of President Donald Trump's immigration policies while he was in office, positioning them as a threat to business innovation and growth. Even though Trump had a habit of calling for his followers to boycott Apple, Goodyear, Harley-Davidson, and other corporations when they did things he disliked, Levi's managed to escape his ire. Instead of finding itself thrust into the culture wars, it subtly refined its customer base: An MRI-Simmons study in 2019 found that Wrangler's customers leaned Republican, while Levi's was more popular with Democrats.
Sey started at Levi's as an assistant marketing manager in 1999 at the age of 30. Over the next two decades, as jeans styles changed—boot cut, bell-bottom, skinny, low-rise, boyfriend, high-waisted, and on and on—and as newer denim brands flitted in and out of fashion, her job was to somehow keep Levi's cool. It was a struggle. Between 1996 and 2010, Levi's sales plummeted 60% and the company repeatedly had to close plants and lay off employees. “There were trends, especially in the late '90s and early 2000s, that Levi's should have been able to take advantage of but didn't,” Sey says. “We'd grown complacent.”
As Sey, a talented marketer, rose through the organization, she worked to make Levi's relevant again. She got a pair of Levi's to star in the 2005 film Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, prompting Ad Age to name her to its list of 40 marketers under 40. After she became the company's CMO in 2013, she fixated on music. Levi's started hosting parties at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, hired Alicia Keys as its brand ambassador, and collaborated with Justin Timberlake on a clothing line. As sales rebounded, Sey's personal accomplishments swelled: She was honored as one of Billboard's 25 most powerful people in music fashion in 2016 and among Forbes's most influential CMOs three years in a row.
At the same time, she and Bergh devised Levi's social issue strategy. She didn't choose the issues but was part of the executive team that figured out when it made sense for Levi's to speak out and in what way. “The part that I drove—and I'm pondering this a lot now—was our pivot,” Sey says. “How do we communicate these things we care about in a way that feels authentic?”
Levi's first approached Sey about her Twitter behavior in the summer of 2020. The head of corporate communications, Kelly McGinnis, broke the ice with a phone call.
“The first thing Jen said was, ‘I expected this call,' ” McGinnis recalls. “She wasn't surprised at all.” The women knew each other well. Over the years they'd worked together on presentations and get-out-the-vote drives. McGinnis was upfront with Sey.
“Her concern was that when I speak as the CMO of the brand, I speak for the brand even if I don't have Levi's mentioned in my [Twitter] profile,” Sey says. (According to the Internet Archive, Sey had “proud Levi's employee of 22 years” in her Twitter bio as of December 2021.)
McGinnis didn't ask Sey to stop tweeting, just to think before she did. If an executive of Levi's was publicly casting doubt on the legitimacy of public health policy, calling for the end of lockdowns, claiming that Fauci didn't care if people starved, it sounded as if Levi's felt that way, too.
“I said, ‘I don't think that's true,' ” Sey says she told McGinnis. “I am a private citizen and a public school mom. From my perspective, this is too important.”
That's not how McGinnis remembers the conversation. “She knew she was the steward of our most popular brand. She said, ‘I understand. I hear you. I can hold that line.' ”
Sey was part of the executive team that received updates on Levi's employees who were falling sick and even dying from Covid, the team that decided what safety precautions the company should put in place. On Levi's website she wrote open letters to the company's employees and customers about how the pandemic affected her personally and invited people to participate in a daily #handstandchallenge on her personal social media. In many ways, Sey was the second person, after its CEO, who served as the public face of the company.
She was also thriving in her actual job. With music festivals canceled, Sey had Levi's host Instagram live concerts featuring Snoop Dogg, Questlove, and other musicians. A bet that she and Levi's chief product officer had made a few years before the pandemic was finally paying off, too. The two had reintroduced the company's line of women's jeans, which had historically always been an afterthought, accounting for just 20% of revenue. But women bought more clothes online than men during the pandemic, and their efforts kept sales at Levi's from tumbling even further. (Today, a third of Levi's revenue comes from women's jeans, and the company expects it to rise to half within a few years.)
In October 2020, Levi's promoted Sey to brand president. When her salary, bonus, and stock options were combined, she would make about $2.8 million a year. Legally she also became what's known as a beneficial owner of the company, one of a handful of executives whose stock trades—along with those of her husband—had to be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid allegations of insider trading. Sey now oversaw both the company's merchandising and design teams and was the top executive in charge of Levi's image. “It's sort of like all the functions that create the brand perception,” Sey says. She was also one of the few people in line to become the next CEO whenever the 64-year-old Bergh decided to retire.
Meanwhile, Sey kept tweeting. She said that putting a mask on a child “signals to the world and the child themselves that they are dangerous, vile, to be silenced and shunned.” She incorrectly claimed that in California, people who lived alone “are never allowed to see anyone ever.” (Another Twitter user corrected her.) But the topic she mentioned most frequently was schools. In San Francisco, as in many districts around the country, by the fall of 2020, private schools had reopened but public schools remained closed. Sey joined a local parenting group, and in December 2020 she, Kotzin, and a few other parents protested outside San Francisco's City Hall, pushing for a return to in-person learning.
She also approached Levi's executive team with a proposition: The company should take a public stance, as it had done with gun control and LGBTQ rights, and advocate for the reopening of San Francisco's schools. Levi's declined, saying it didn't wade into local issues. Sey says McGinnis also told executives there were “a lot of potential negatives” to taking a stand on public schools, because most Levi's executives' kids went to private school.
Sey was livid. “The policy of closed schools is fundamentally an issue of equality, and for wealthy White executives to send their kids to private school and have no care that other people can't access that same right, that is hypocrisy to the highest degree,” she told me. But she didn't say that at the time. “I just made my proposal and accepted their response.” And Levi's did agree to work with her behind the scenes. It helped Sey get in touch with San Francisco's chamber of commerce and facilitated an introduction to Mayor London Breed's chief of staff.
Regular Levi's employees weren't aware of this intra-executive disagreement over schools. All they saw were Sey's public tweets. By early 2021, Levi's HR department and McGinnis's communications team were getting questions about her. Why was a Levi's executive questioning the efficacy of masks, a direct contradiction to company policy? Did she not care that hundreds of thousands of people across the country had died from Covid? The communications team shared what they were hearing with both Bergh and Sey.
Gossip was circulating in other ways, too. A story spread about a group of designers at Levi's Innovation Lab—where prototypes for new styles and production methods are developed and tested—who'd spent weeks preparing for a presentation to Sey, only to see that she'd somehow tweeted about Covid 11 times during their hourlong meeting.
McGinnis talked to her again. “Then it was legal. Then it was HR,” Sey says. “I'd ask, ‘Are you telling me that I need to stop tweeting?' And they would always say, ‘No, we can't do that, but we're urging you to consider what you're saying.' ”
Offline, she and Kotzin got increasingly frustrated that their children weren't in school. Their 5-year-old son started kindergarten on a Chromebook. They worried he was becoming withdrawn. Sey would be working remotely for the foreseeable future, so they sold their San Francisco condo for $2.4 million and in February 2021 moved to an 8,000-square-foot, $3.8 million mansion in Denver so he could attend a public charter school in person. “I wanted to go to Florida,” Kotzin says—they'd recently become fans of Governor DeSantis's carefree handling of Covid—but the three-hour time difference would've made it hard for Sey to do her job.
After Sey tweeted about her family's decision to move, she was invited to appear on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News as a mom who'd “fled” California's draconian Covid protocols. Before she went on, she told Bergh that she was going to do a television interview, but she didn't say what show it was. Sey didn't mention Levi's or say anything controversial during the four minutes she was on the air, but before her segment, host Laura Ingraham railed against “the medical media cartel” as a chyron below her flashed “Dems push litany of lies to obscure radical agenda.”
Ingraham's show was a strange venue choice for Sey. The image that she had helped cultivate for Levi's could easily be described as the opposite of whatever Ingraham thinks. On a previous show, Ingraham had joked that most people would rather wear adult diapers than use a unisex bathroom. Levi's signed a 2019 amicus brief in support of a transgender teenager who was denied the use of his high school restroom. The company's foundation also donated to reproductive health groups including the International Planned Parenthood Federation; Ingraham claimed the organization conducted “mass extermination” and likened it to Hitler.
Employees were furious. At the beginning of the pandemic, Bergh had started hosting virtual town hall events—cutely named Chips and Beer—where employees could submit questions, which the communications team would vet live and pass along to him. At the next Chips and Beer so many people complained about Sey's Ingraham Angle appearance that the communications team felt Bergh had to address the unrest. “Can Chip please comment on Jen Sey's recent appearance on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News? I was deeply disappointed and confused at the disconnect between morals & values the company projects and that of our leaders,” one employee submitted. Bergh, who declined to be interviewed by Businessweek, defended Sey, explaining that she was speaking as a private citizen about school closures and it was within her right to do so. “I really appreciate Chip addressing the Jen Sey question,” another employee responded, “however I am still very uncomfortable with her appearing on Laura Ingraham's show. … She is an especially divisive and bigoted personality who regularly attacks the very causes that Chip and the company champion. I am embarrassed that my brand president gave her credence by appearing on her show and to me it showed very poor judgement.”
“I'll be honest,” says Sey, who was responsible for Levi's massive advertising budget. “I've never seen her show. I've never even watched Fox News.” Before Covid, Sey says, she'd been a self-described “left of left of center” Democrat. She and Kotzin marched in San Francisco's Pride parades, hung not one but three framed Barack Obama “Hope” posters in their dining room, and supported Elizabeth Warren's candidacy. Once during the early days of the pandemic, Sey was so frustrated with Trump that she tweeted a poop emoji at him. But extended lockdowns changed all that.
“I've watched ‘progressive' leaders destroy public education, deny kids access to public life, ruin small businesses, demonize a segment of the population,” she wrote on Twitter, where she increasingly referred to herself as a woman without a political party. Sey says she would have gladly gone on CNN, but Fox was the only network to invite her on air. “We all have to come out of our corners a little bit and talk to each other,” she told me.
At Levi's, employees weren't buying the idea that Sey was speaking as a private citizen—nor that her appearance didn't indicate tacit support of Ingraham's beliefs. Some people emailed Bergh directly with their concerns.
“I didn't care about her opinion on schools,” says Brian Nixon, an executive assistant at Levi's and one of the people who reached out to Bergh about Sey. “Her Covid views were pretty extreme.” Sey had coined the term “vaccist,” for vaccinated people who refused to associate with the unvaccinated, and “childsplaining,” for “when those without children explain why your kids are learning just fine on Zoom and at least they aren't dead.” She objected to the characterization of ivermectin. “Stop calling it horse dewormer!” she tweeted. She questioned whether booster shots were just drug companies' latest money-making schemes.
“She was repeatedly attacking obese people, old people. She was anti-vax, anti-mask, and that wasn't following the science, in my mind,” Nixon says. “We were making decisions as a company on masking policies, and it felt like she didn't believe in any of that.” Bergh shared Nixon's concerns anonymously with Sey.
Companies have been navigating the highs and lows of social media for almost 20 years, but Levi's had suddenly found itself in its most dreaded terrain: a star executive tweeting controversial opinions about a deadly pandemic, and employees holding the company accountable for it. To see how the uproar might play out, all Levi's had to do was look at other companies that had faced similar bouts of internal activism. In 2014, Mozilla Corp. employees effectively pushed out their CEO because he'd supported California's anti-gay-marriage law Proposition 8 six years previously. More recently, workers at Amazon.com, Disney, Facebook, Google, and Netflix have staged highly publicized walkouts for corporate inaction on issues ranging from climate change to hate speech. So far, Levi's employees hadn't gone public, but the more Sey tweeted, the more likely that would change.
Pressure was mounting from the outside, too. Sey's tweets had earned her tens of thousands of new followers, and random people were taking screenshots and tagging Levi's with questions about its executive's behavior. On Reddit's r/gymnastics community, users got so upset over Sey's Covid stances that they considered circulating a petition to get her fired from Levi's.
Again, Levi's human resources team met with Sey. At their suggestion, she deleted some of her tweets, including an objection to employers requiring vaccines (a contradiction of Levi's own mandate) and one in which she suggested the CDC fight Covid by urging obese people to “get healthy.”
Employees also complained about Kotzin, who often compared the medical community to Nazis and other oppressors. “Living in San Francisco is like living in North Korea,” he tweeted. “The people who put masks on small children are the same people who whipped their slaves in times gone by.” “We are not beagles in Fauci's lab.”
In May 2021, after Kotzin tweeted a picture of two drinking fountains with the words “vaxxed” and “unvaxxed” over them, along with the observation that “Separate is never equal,” the company's Black employee resource group asked to meet with Sey, who was the group's founding executive sponsor. They were upset that her husband seemed to equate a temporary public health measure with racist segregation in the Jim Crow South. By all accounts the meeting went relatively well, though Sey rejected the idea that her husband's tweets might reflect badly on her.
“My response was always, ‘He doesn't work here,' ” she says. At home, things were less black and white. “We had many discussions on it,” Kotzin says. “The concern was, ‘If you keep tweeting, I won't be able to be CEO.'” Kotzin offered to delete any tweets that made his wife uncomfortable. “She took me up on it, so I deleted two tweets that were fairly anodyne.” He says he can't remember what they were.
In October 2021, Sey met with Bergh to discuss her performance as brand president, which they both agreed was going well. Levi's sales had rebounded from their early pandemic slump. The company's stock price was up. The brand was cool again; Vogue editors had recently selected multiple Levi's styles, including the classic 501, in their roundup of favorite jeans.
At Levi's, as is the case at many companies, it's standard practice to conduct a due diligence analysis of top executives who are considered potential successors. They'd check to make sure neither Sey nor her husband had financial conflicts of interest or held political office. They'd do background checks. And they'd review their social media accounts for anything that could damage the company's reputation. Bergh asked Sey whether, given the controversy over her tweets, she'd like to undergo the investigation now or wait until it became unavoidable. Sey agreed to get it over with but wasn't optimistic. “I said to him, ‘I think I know what you're going to find.' ”
During the last week of January, to no one's surprise, Bergh told Sey that she'd failed the due diligence report. Not only would she never become Levi's CEO, but Bergh informed her she couldn't continue to hold the title of brand president, which was supposed to be filled by a potential successor. According to Levi's, Bergh offered to let Sey move into a different, less visible, position, but Sey told him she didn't want to. (Sey says another role was never discussed as a viable option.) Their conversation ended there. The HR department would handle the rest.
Sey says HR asked her to remain at Levi's for six months while the company looked for her replacement—and to please cool it with the tweeting in the meantime. “That put me over the edge,” Sey told me. “You've been asking me for two years to stop, with essentially the threat of my job. Now I don't have a job. Why do you think that I would stop now?”
Levi's says discussions between Sey and HR didn't advance because three weeks later she quit.
On Feb. 13, during the Super Bowl, after 23 years of working for the company, Sey sent Bergh a three-sentence resignation email. The next morning, she published a confessional online titled “Yesterday I Was Levi's Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.” In it, she said that Levi's—“like so many other American companies: held hostage by intolerant ideologues who do not believe in genuine inclusion or diversity”—pushed her out because of her belief that schools needed to be reopened. “I was on track to become the next CEO of Levi's,” she wrote. “All I had to do was stop talking about the school thing.”
She chose to run the piece in the personal Substack newsletter of Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editor who in 2020 had resigned with her own open letter accusing the newspaper of abandoning “intellectual curiosity” in favor of a “new orthodoxy” of progressivism. After that came television interviews: Sey went on Tucker Carlson Tonight and returned to Ingraham's show. There were spots on CNN, CNBC, Megyn Kelly's podcast, and others. She and Kotzin did joint interviews on a local Denver talk show, an anti-Covid lockdown podcast and a libertarian one. Fox News' Rundown podcast lamented that Sey was yet another victim of “cancel culture.” The New York Post reprinted Sey's op-ed article with the headline, “I Was Bullied Out of Levi's by the Intolerant Woke Mob.”
In her interviews, Sey was friendly and calm; she came across as someone with a lot of media experience, which of course she had. She hit the same talking points over and over. “The issue at stake is free speech,” she told Kelly. To Carlson: “This whole thing has sort of culminated in really being about the silencing of dissent.”
When NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post picked up the story, they also took the bait, characterizing Sey's departure as an issue of free speech, though the First Amendment doesn't actually apply to employees of private companies. After the story in the Times ran, even its own columnist Kara Swisher called out the disingenuous nature of the free speech argument by a veteran executive. “Pretending that an utterly progressive company like Levi's would not react is willfully naive,” Swisher tweeted. “If you worked for any number of conservative companies and went off, the result would be the same.”
Much of the coverage also focused on a claim Sey had made in her resignation essay: that Levi's had offered her $1 million in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement about why she left—but she wouldn't take it. “It's such a virtuous thing to do,” Carlson told her. Kelly called her “very brave.”
But Levi's says it never offered her $1 million to stay silent. According to the standard executive severance agreement outlined in the company's proxy report, Sey would have received 78 weeks of her base salary pay, which works out to about $1 million. But she quit before a formal offer was made. “I asked several times to see the package. Three times. But it was not sent to me,” Sey told me. She says the $1 million amount “was told to me” by Bergh, though she concedes she never did get it in writing.
Since Sey left, both she and Levi's have fallen back into their respective comfort zones. In recent weeks, Levi's has tweeted a link to its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Impact report. It joined a list of 60 companies condemning Texas for classifying teens' transgender medical treatment as “child abuse.” It gave a social media shoutout to the Chicano community.
Sey, of course, is still tweeting to her now 63,000 followers. About the pandemic, yes, but also about free speech, for-profit drug companies, and “modern wokeness.” Her tone feels different, though. Angrier. Accusatory. She's getting in Twitter spats, most recently with the American Red Cross. In March, when Kotzin was briefly suspended from Twitter, Sey tweeted that he had been silenced, too. “You think they aren't coming for you?” she posted. “We're just evil?”
After three decades in corporate America, Sey says she's taking a break. She's writing a “memoir about using your voice” and making a documentary about the harmful effects of pandemic school closures on children. Kotzin and two other Covid skeptics are suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for infringing upon their freedom of speech by allegedly directing Twitter to police Covid misinformation.
She's also flirting with politics. In March, Sey flew to Florida to attend a roundtable hosted by DeSantis, in which he promised to “stop the Covid theater.” “@GovRonDeSantis went business casual in Levi's. Here for it,” Sey tweeted after the event, attaching a photo of her grinning next to the politician.
Quitting a company and then publicly airing a litany of grievances against it would normally make a person unemployable. But Sey is a sly marketer who knows that with every rebrand comes the possibility of new customers. “Need a brand president? CMO?” she tweeted at Elon Musk hours after he struck a deal to buy Twitter. Musk didn't reply, but no matter, she says she's already been approached by other companies, though she won't say which ones. “Respectable brands I used to use as reference points. Competitors,” she says. “Not like, My Pillow or whatever.”
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