In 2017, Callie Veelenturf won the first conservation scholarship given out by Turtle Island Restoration Network, which meant she’d be traveling with Todd Steiner, the head of the West Marin-based nonprofit, to study sharks and turtles at Cocos Island, 350 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.
At first Ms. Veelenturf, who has devoted much of her career to sea turtles and later founded the nonprofit Leatherback Project, was thrilled to be working closely with Mr. Steiner. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime,” she said in a TIRN press release at the time.
But a remark he made in front of a crowd of people on the expedition jarred her. “‘Everyone would think that I just picked the most beautiful girl that applied,’” she recalled him saying.
“It was really uncomfortable for me because I felt sexually objectified in front of all these people,” Ms. Veelenturf said. “That was the first red flag.” The line became “almost a catchphrase for him,” something he repeated several times on the trip, she said.
Over the next year that she worked at TIRN, there were multiple occasions when Ms. Veelenturf says Mr. Steiner detailed his sexual history to her. She said he asked incessantly about her love life, and he told her he was obsessed with her and loved her, all despite her clear objections. She was a 26-year-old who had just moved from Boston to West Marin to work for the marine wildlife conservation nonprofit. He was the 61-year-old executive director.
One year after winning the scholarship, Ms. Veelenturf submitted an 11-page, single-spaced letter to the board detailing what she described as sexual harassment. She sought legal help and went to mediation with the nonprofit in February 2019.
Last month, she and nearly a dozen other former Turtle Island staffers approached the Light to describe what they see as a culture of harassment at a nonprofit that attracts scores of volunteers a year.
Ms. Veelenturf was limited in what she could say about the lawsuit because of a non-disclosure agreement that other staffers said she signed as part of a March 2019 settlement. She said her suit was “resolved in a manner agreeable to all parties.” But California code prohibits N.D.A.s from covering the details of sexual assault or harassment allegations.
Ms. Veelenturf was not the only employee to bring legal action against the nonprofit. Other harassment and discrimination complaints emerged in late 2018, and around that time, five of seven members of the group’s board of directors resigned for unclear reasons. Many former staffers say Mr. Steiner never faced any real consequences, and they describe a workplace where it could be extremely difficult to say no to him.
Eleven former TIRN staffers told the Light that Mr. Steiner bullied staff, yelled at them and retaliated against them for perceived challenges to his authority over the organization. Like many small employers, TIRN has no human resources person, and several sources said they were met with little action when they raised concerns to managing director Scott Artis.
Nearly all the staffers who spoke to the Light said they believe strongly in the conservation work that TIRN does. Yet the organization’s management is centered on Mr. Steiner’s whims and gets in the way of its stated mission, they said. Three employees said they heard Mr. Steiner say plainly more than once that he would rather see TIRN die than have something bad happen to him.
In an email to the Light this week, Mr. Steiner apologized for speaking in “far too familiar and personal terms” with Ms. Veelenturf, conversations he acknowledged crossed professional boundaries. He did not address other former employees’ experiences or concerns.
Mr. Steiner has been the leader of the organization since he founded it in 1989 as the Sea Turtle Restoration Project under the umbrella of the Bay Area nonprofit Earth Island Institute. The group’s initial conservation work—tagging turtles on beaches in Central America—grew into campaigning for policy change, and by 1997 TIRN became its own independent nonprofit, which now has around 15 employees. In 2019, TIRN took in some $3.2 million in revenue, half of which came from donations.
TIRN is the parent organization for the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, which has used litigation to advocate for strict development regulations in the San Geronimo Valley. SPAWN has sued Marin three times in the last decade, accusing the county of failing to adopt stream conservation measures that protect coho salmon and steelhead trout.
While Ms. Veelenturf was working at the office the nonprofit leases from the National Park Service outside Olema, she said Mr. Steiner would frequently pull her aside for conversations that would start out work-related and then devolve. She said Mr. Steiner told her he was jealous of how she spent her time, and that he couldn’t make clear decisions about her as an employee because he wanted to be with her all the time. “‘I can’t even be objective about this because I’m obsessed with you,’” she recalled him saying.
Ms. Veelenturf wrote down many of Mr. Steiner’s remarks at the time. “I process things by writing them out,” she told the Light.
On a second trip to Cocos Island, Ms. Veelenturf says Mr. Steiner told her she reminded him of a woman with whom he was passionately in love in his youth. “‘It’s not like you don’t make me wish I was 26 again,’” she remembered him saying.
Then there was the time she says he told her he’d never been the one to initiate sex with a woman, and pointedly asked her: “How many people would I have had sex with if I had just asked?”
But the last straw came one night in October 2018. Ms. Veelenturf had driven to a staff gathering at Limantour Beach, where she had to turn down drinks from Mr. Steiner, who allegedly told her he was trying to get her drunk. Other employees at the beach that night said Mr. Steiner appeared to be very drunk, and was pushing alcohol on others.
At the end of the night, Ms. Veelenturf said Mr. Steiner told her he was too intoxicated to drive home, and he asked for a ride. On the way home, she recalled that he asked her if he had ever made her feel uncomfortable, and she responded that he certainly had. As they pulled into his driveway, Ms. Veelenturf said Mr. Steiner asked her to shut off the car. “‘I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel uncomfortable in the past, but I’m in love with you,’” she remembered him saying.
Reading from notes she took at the time, Ms. Veelenturf said he went on to profess his love for her three more times during the conversation, acknowledge their “material age difference,” and compare her to his previous romantic interests, including another past employee. “He made a distinction that the difference between me and this other person that he felt so passionately connected to was that he wasn’t sexually attracted to her, but he was to me,” Ms. Veelenturf said.
She told him several times that she felt uncomfortable and she asked him to leave the car, a request she said he ignored. She remembered tracing the “H” of the Honda logo on her steering wheel with her finger as she thought: “I need to escape. I need my brain to be somewhere else right now.”
The morning after she drove Mr. Steiner home, she decided she had gathered enough information to make a complaint against him. She called Mr. Artis and told him everything.
Mr. Artis responded by telling her to follow the employee handbook, which directed her to bring the matter to the executive director: Mr. Steiner. Soon, Mr. Steiner caught wind of her complaint, and he called her, asking her for advice about how to behave around her. “I just kept saying ‘just be professional,’” she said.
Many small employers do not have a procedure for reporting sexual harassment if the harasser is the victim’s supervisor, said David Oppenheimer, the director of the University of California, Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-discrimination Law.
“It’s a very common problem, but it’s clearly addressed in the law,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “An employer should have a procedure for who to complain to if your supervisor is the harasser.”
He added, “Their failure to have an alternative is, at a minimum, a technical violation of state and federal law.”
Mr. Steiner, in his email to the Light this week, wrote that he was wrong not to “take into account the power dynamics inherent in the difference between an employee’s position and mine.”
But he added: “My words were not sexual advances, I did not engage in any inappropriate physical actions, and I was never accused of predatory behavior. Still, my words caused her pain and discomfort, and I greatly regret my actions to this day.”
He wrote that he was grateful to members of the board for choosing to allow him to keep his position, and to his wife, who he said has forgiven him. “I am grateful to my former colleague for being willing to engage in a good-faith mediation that resulted in a settlement acceptable to her,” he said.
He wrote, “I continue to be embarrassed that my foolish words, and my failure to keep them to myself, caused pain to others. I regret that deeply.”
Although Ms. Veelenturf can’t speak about some aspects of her lawsuit, multiple coworkers corroborated her experiences. She had spoken contemporaneously to Skylar Lipman, a habitat restoration intern at the organization, about some of Mr. Steiner’s comments, and how they made her uncomfortable.
Ms. Veelenturf asked Ms. Lipman to walk by whenever she saw her in a one-on-one conversation with Mr. Steiner, which was often. Ms. Lipman said that Mr. Steiner would frequently stop talking until she was gone, but she recalled overhearing him say that he was jealous of how Ms. Veelenturf spent her time.
A former development manager at TIRN, Stepph Sharpe, said that in late 2018, Mr. Artis told her and communications manager Rebekah Staub to forgo mentioning Ms. Veelenturf in any press releases or fundraising emails. There was no explanation for the change. Ms. Sharpe said she was surprised by the request and didn’t understand it. She had started working at TIRN in September and was disconcerted by changes that ensued shortly after.
In October of that year, Mr. Artis was promoted from development director to managing director, telling staff members that his new position meant he would be a “buffer” between them and Mr. Steiner. Soon after, much of the board resigned, and the staff was required to take an online training module about sexual harassment.
Ms. Sharpe couldn’t confirm what had happened to Ms. Veelenturf until a few years later. After Ms. Sharpe resigned in April of this year, the two got in touch. They met with nearly a dozen other former employees who together decided to contact the Light to share their experiences.
Cassandra Burdyshaw, who worked as TIRN’s policy and advocacy manager for three years, filed a discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in late 2018. During her time at the organization, Ms. Burdyshaw saw three communications directors come and go, and she said they were treated very differently.
The first director, a woman, was competent and professional, Ms. Burdyshaw said. Yet for some reason unclear to Ms. Burdyshaw, Mr. Steiner fired her by posting her job position online without telling her in advance. The male replacement was far less competent, Ms. Burdyshaw said, but Mr. Steiner was lenient and often gave him the benefit of the doubt. “The different treatment between the two of them was a red flag,” Ms. Burdyshaw said. “That communicated a lot to me.”
The third communications director, Melissa Angel, was called to give an interview in Ms. Veelenturf’s lawsuit. She stated that Mr. Steiner yelled at and bullied her, and that her job was also threatened when she raised concerns about gender discrimination. Along with Ms. Burdyshaw, Ms. Angel said she raised a complaint with the board over differences in pay and treatment between male and female employees. Soon after her meeting with the board, Mr. Steiner heard about the complaints.
“In theory this was a confidential meeting, yet after the meeting Todd somehow knew,” Ms. Burdyshaw said. “He used that meeting to threaten me…He told me he was looking for people to replace me.”
Ms. Burdyshaw’s allegations made it into Ms. Veelenturf’s legal case, but Mr. Steiner did not address them in his email. Mr. Oppenheimer said Mr. Steiner’s alleged actions would have constituted illegal retaliation under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act.
That same year saw what former staff described as a “mass exodus” from the board. Board members Julie Hanft, Brendan Cummings, Barbara Andrews, Deborah Sivas and Donna Howe all stepped down. Several of them had attended meetings with the staff members who alleged discrimination or harassment.
Ms. Howe, who was chair of the board when Ms. Veelenturf and Ms. Burdyshaw made their complaints, did not deny the accusations. She said the board made sure they were promptly investigated and “amicably settled through mediation.”
She called Mr. Steiner’s alleged harassment an “anomaly” in his career, and said he owned up to his mistakes. She said the settlement did not use any donor money, and that the organization has taken steps to remediate Mr. Steiner’s actions, including sexual harassment training.
Reached by phone, Ms. Howe questioned why the former staff members had come forward with accusations from three years ago. “These are all incidents that happened long ago, and were all formally resolved, and everyone moved on,” she said.
Ms. Howe denied that the accusations were the reason she resigned, and said she still supports the organization financially. “I left with a lot of self-reflection and with a plan for moving on to another board,” she said.
Current board members Carole Allen, Deb Castellana and Brock Cahill wrote in an email to the Light that they have “full confidence” in Mr. Steiner, and accused the former employees of trying to “resuscitate settled issues.”
“We know of what transpired a few years ago, and we have seen Todd’s work to undo the damage his words caused at that time,” they wrote.
Yet well after Ms. Veelenturf accused the organization of harassment and left, Mr. Steiner and Mr. Artis were still putting young female subordinates in uncomfortable situations, according to former staff. In February 2020, Mr. Artis asked Livia Charles, an unpaid intern, to drive Mr. Steiner to San Francisco to attend a rally. Ms. Charles texted Ms. Sharpe to say that she did not want to give him a ride, but she wound up waiting for him. “I didn’t feel comfortable saying no to Todd,” Ms. Charles said.
After the rally, Ms. Charles and another intern found that Mr. Steiner had already left for a meal with friends, so they waited for several more hours. “This is after the lawsuit,” said Ms. Sharpe, the former development manager. “After Scott knew everything with Callie, he still put the young interns in that position.”
Mr. Artis did not respond to the Light’s request for comment.
Amid the George Floyd protests last summer, several TIRN staff members formed an environmental justice group within the organization, hoping to inspire more conversation about racial justice and push for implicit bias training for staff.
Ms. Sharpe said much of the staff supported adding this training, but she became frustrated when Mr. Steiner vigorously denied that the organization needed any such group. In a recorded meeting with his staff, he told them: “If I was part of an organization whose mission I thought was being subverted, I’d quit.”
As she continued to meet with the environmental justice group, Ms. Sharpe said Mr. Steiner and Mr. Artis balked at making changes, and their relationship deteriorated. She eventually resigned in April, before which, she said: “Scott didn’t talk to me for about three months.”
Her partner, Andrew Scott, who worked at TIRN as an office manager, left around the same time. He said the nonprofit’s high turnover means many employees enter the job without meeting anyone to tell them how Mr. Steiner runs things. “When you leave the organization, your head is spinning,” he said.