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A Black executive working out of Condé Nast’s Manhattan headquarters claims he was fired for allegedly stealing two bowls of oatmeal from the employee cafeteria—but says white staffers “regularly” stole food without repercussion.
Bradley Bristol, who was hired as a senior finance analyst in the august media company’s video and entertainment unit last January, had receipts for the food and provided them to higher-ups, according to a newly filed civil lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast. However, Bristol believes management was already bent on terminating him for having complained about allegedly discriminatory treatment by his boss, and ginned up the oatmeal narrative as a pretext for pushing him out, the suit alleges.
Racial issues have roiled Condé Nast in recent years, leading to what The New York Times deemed “a reckoning” in 2020. That June, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, a venerable Condé title, stepped down after photos surfaced of him wearing brownface. Two days later, the company’s head of lifestyle video programming for Bon Appétit, Epicurious, Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest, Vogue, Self, Allure, and Glamour resigned amid accusations of racism and biased treatment of non-white employees. Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue, followed with an apology, taking “full responsibility” for “mistakes… publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant.” In 2021, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue was ousted from her job before she even started, when anti-Asian tweets she had posted a decade earlier went viral.