In a recent TIME Magazine article, a claim of misconduct was made about an “influential figure in EA”:
A third [woman] described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”
Shortly after the article came out, Julia Wise (CEA’s community liaison) informed the EV UK board that this concerned behaviour of Owen Cotton-Barratt;[1] the incident occurred more than 5 years ago and was reported to her in 2021.[2] (Owen became a board member in 2020.)
Following this, on February 11th, Owen voluntarily resigned from the board. This included stepping down from his role with Wytham Abbey; he is also no longer helping organise The Summit on Existential Security.
Though Owen’s account of the incident differs in scope and emphasis from the version expressed in the TIME article, he still believes that he made significant mistakes, and also notes that there have been other cases where he regretted his behaviour.
It's very important to us that EV and the wider EA community strive to provide safe and respectful environments, and that we have reliable mechanisms for investigating and addressing claims of misconduct in the EA community. So, in order to better understand what happened, we are commissioning an external investigation by an independent law firm into Owen’s behaviour and the Community Health team’s response.[3]
This post is jointly from the Board of EV UK: Claire Zabel, Nick Beckstead, Tasha McCauley and Will MacAskill.
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The disclosure occurred as follows: shortly after the article came out, Owen and Julia agreed that Julia would work out whether Owen's identity should be disclosed to other people in EV UK and EV US; Julia determined that it should be shared with the boards.
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Julia writes about her response at the time here.
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See comment here from Chana Messinger on behalf of the Community Health team.
I want to explain my role in this situation, and to apologize for not handling it better. The role I played was in the context of my work as a community liaison at CEA.
(All parts that mention specific people were run past those people.)
In 2021, the woman who described traveling to a job interview in the TIME piece told me about her interactions with Owen Cotton-Barratt several years before. She said she found many aspects of his interactions with her to be inappropriate.
We talked about what steps she wanted taken. Based on her requests, I had conversations with Owen and some of his colleagues. I tried to make sure that Owen understood the inappropriateness of his behavior and that steps were taken to reduce the risk of such things happening again. Owen apologized to the woman. The woman wrote to me to say that she felt relieved and appreciated my help. Later, I wrote about power dynamics based partly on this situation.
However, I think I didn’t do enough to address the risk of his behavior continuing in other settings. I didn’t pay enough attention to what other pieces might need addressing, like the fact that, by the time I learned about the situation, he was on the board of EV UK (then called CEA UK), or the areas where he could influence funding and career opportunities for other people.
No other women raised complaints about him to me, but I learned (in some cases from him) of a couple of other situations where his interactions with women in EA were questionable. None of these seemed as serious on their own from what I knew — one of the women summarized it as "He apologized to me then, and I accepted it and things were / are totally fine.” But they formed a pattern, and I should have taken that pattern more seriously.
A few months ago Owen told me about another more recent situation where, according to him, he had made another woman uncomfortable. I didn’t reach out to the woman about this at the time, which I now think was a mistake. I understand EV UK and EV US’s external investigation will look into what happened here.
I also didn’t seek adequate backup given that I was friends with Owen. (Owen and I live in different countries and were not close friends, but we and our families have spent social time together.) When the woman in the TIME piece told me that her concern was about Owen, I flagged to her that I was friends with him. She and I decided to proceed anyway because we couldn’t think of a better option, although she felt it was unhealthy for EA that people who had power were entwined in these ways.
If I had flagged the situation earlier and more thoroughly to others, they might have recognized the parts of the situation that I hadn’t handled adequately. I should have thought more about how to get more help here or how to hand off the situation to someone else.
After reading the TIME piece, I flagged my worries about Owen’s roles in EA to the EV UK and EV US boards. I had earlier flagged some parts of the situation to my manager, but not the whole picture.
I’m really sorry that I didn’t handle this better. It’s really important to me that women in the community can do their best work without wondering if they’ll be treated unfairly, be hit on in professional contexts, or worse.
I understand that EV UK and EV US will be working with external evaluators to assess my and my team’s processes here and evaluating the choices that I and my manager made in handling this situation. I will also be reflecting further on my own and with my team.
I’m guessing that my mistakes here may mean some people will feel less comfortable bringing problems to me. For unrelated reasons, over the last two months my team had moved most of our work on interpersonal harm to my colleague Catherine Low, who was not involved in this situation. If you’d like to get help from the community health team but don’t want me involved, please feel free to contact Catherine or my other teammates (and you can ask them to not share information about the situation with me.)
[Edited to add: more info added below]
In 2021, the woman and I discussed who she wanted to know about the situation. Our focus was on his colleagues at that time and people he might have a mentorship relationship with. I’ve clarified here that this did include one person who was a board member of EV UK (then called CEA UK) at the time.
When the TIME piece publicly described the situation but not either of the people’s identities, Nicole and I decided that the board should know that the account was about Owen (but not the identity of the woman).