In 2000, Mr. Reid, a founder of the influential Atlanta label LaFace, replaced Mr. Davis as president of Arista. Ms. Dixon said that their relationship, which had been professional and cordial when they knew each other as industry colleagues, changed quickly. “Almost immediately,” the suit says, he began “sexualizing and harassing” Ms. Dixon, then 29.
In January 2001, the suit says, Arista held a companywide retreat in Puerto Rico. Ms. Dixon was invited to fly alongside Mr. Reid and other executives on a private plane, then arrived and discovered that no other passengers were onboard. Mr. Reid, the complaint says, “asked her to sit next to him to go over materials for the presentation, and then he began playing with her hair, kissing her and digitally penetrated her vulva without her consent.” She spent the rest of the flight “in a daze,” the complaint says. Though the company had booked her a hotel room, she shared her assistant’s, and traveled home on a commercial flight.
Ms. Dixon then took pains to avoid being alone with Mr. Reid, who invited her to meetings in his room at the Four Seasons in Manhattan “night after night,” the suit says. She spoke with a life coach, to whom she disclosed the assault, about how to evade him while also maintaining her job; she was eager to keep her position not only for professional reasons but because a recent cancer diagnosis made her fear losing her health insurance, the suit says.
When Ms. Dixon succeeded at circumventing Mr. Reid’s advances, the suit says, he “retaliated against her by embarrassing her in front of others or otherwise being curt and unprofessional” and punished the artists Ms. Dixon had already signed, or wanted to sign: “Promotional and recording budgets were suddenly reduced dramatically or frozen altogether. Song demos and artist auditions were flatly rejected.”
“It was very clear that I was being punished because I would not comply,” she said in the interview.
After a work event later in 2001, when Ms. Dixon acquiesced and accepted an offer for a ride home from Mr. Reid in his chauffeured car — “a mistake,” she said in the interview — he assaulted her again, the suit says. The pattern of resistance and retaliation continued, the suit says, as Ms. Dixon “realized Mr. Reid would continue to stifle her career.”
Melena Ryzik
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