IES Accusations: A Retraction

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On Tuesday, inside.lighting published a story entitled “IES Accused of Improper Accounting and Possible Wrongful Termination of a Whistleblower.” The accompanying image had bold text that read “Serious Allegations Made Against the IES.”

On Wednesday we removed the article from inside.lighting.

Our reporting was accurate as we were careful to use terms like “accusations” and “allegations”. The story was newsworthy because the serious allegations were made by a former employee of the Illuminating Engineering Society. In our view, she was a credible person. She held an important role with the IES. She currently works for a large, global well-respected engineering services company. She has been a presenter at large industry conferences. She started a lighting-focused small business months before inside.lighting was started and we admired how she grew her business and leveraged social media to do so. We had heard good things about her, anecdotally, over the years.

Our phones and emails were buzzing with the link to her LinkedIn feed minutes after the accuser posted her lengthy accusations. Her post attracted a large number of reactions and comments in the first 47 minutes. Word was getting out about the accusations. This was going to be big news with or without inside.lighting.

We removed the article for the following reasons:

The accuser, herself, removed the original lengthy allegations from her LinkedIn feed approximately 3 hours after posting them. That led us to wonder if she, herself, stood behind what she wrote.
Later on Tuesday, the accuser posted more allegations on social media and removed them including one that stated in part, “formal legal actions are now in the works … and from this point forward, you will not be hearing from me on the issue until all matters are resolved.”
The accuser didn’t live up to her pledge to be silent on the matter. A litany of other posts were made on Tuesday and Wednesday. Some were deleted.
We had frequent interaction with the accuser via text message on Tuesday and Wednesday. We won’t share details because most of the communication was agreed to be off the record. We interpreted the tone of the communication to be vitriolic and deflective rather than fact-focused and evidence-based.

No one, including IES employees and Board Members, requested that we take down the information.

So, with the presentation of the new information above, we made the prudent and responsible decision to remove the article. If legal action or any other evidence-based credible reports emerge about this matter, we will report on it. If she fulfills our request for evidence that backs up her claims we will report on it if, in our judgement, the evidence indeed supports the serious accusations.