As over 40 veteran staffers left the Los Angeles Times via a mass buyout on Friday, one more longtime journalist unexpectedly joined the exodus: De Los assistant editor and reporter Paloma Esquivel resigned after 17 years with the paper, citing management’s alleged failure to address longstanding HR complaints against managing editor Hector Becerra.
Esquivel, who was on the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writing teams in 2011 and 2016, announced her resignation on a company Slack channel Friday, screenshots of which were obtained exclusively by TheWrap. She also included full text of a Feb. 3 letter she said was sent to HR manager Maya Dotson and Executive Editor Terry Tang regarding Becerra’s “inappropriate, highly personal and baseless assessments of his co-workers’ talent levels, work ethic, productivity and collegiality.” She also said in her letter such disparagement was exclusive to “women and staffers of color.”
“On Feb. 3, I sent the letter that’s below to Terry. I never got a response. This is why, after 17 years of investing myself in the L.A. Times and despite how much I truly love my job as an editor with De Los, I’m leaving the L.A. Times today,” Esquivel wrote.
“I’m sharing the letter here now with the hope of a journalist who has always believed that shedding light is sometimes the only way to bring change,” she continued. “I don’t want those of you who remain to have to continue dealing with what too many of us have already had to deal with. My hope for the L.A. Times is that it can one day be a place where workers feel respected and valued and where they can do their work knowing that those in positions of power won’t berate or disparage them. Our work is a service to our community. It deserves better.”
Esquivel’s access to the Times’ Slack channels was revoked soon after she sent the notice, TheWrap has learned.
View screenshots from her correspondence below:
Esquivel then attached a copy of the lengthy Feb. 3 letter she said was sent Feb. 3 to Dotson and Tang.
The letter detailed several instances when Becerra allegedly mistreated employees, mostly women and people of color, including a 2022 joint staff complaint that cited his “inappropriate, highly personal, and baseless assessments of his co-workers’ talent levels, work ethic, productivity, and collegiality.”
Esquivel quoted from the complaint: “Becerra has demonstrated a pattern of both insulting his colleagues directly and disparaging them to others in the newsroom.”
The most recent incident Esquivel mentioned was from January of this year. In response to a message she had written on the company Slack questioning the paper’s editorial decision making under Becerra, Tang and billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, Becerra allegedly called Esquivel to shout and “berate” her, she said.
“He went on shouting for several minutes, telling me that I didn’t understand the kind of pressure managers are under, that Patrick [Soon-Shiong] is the owner of the paper and that if people don’t like it they don’t need to work here. I eventually told him that it was inappropriate for him to shout at me and told him that perhaps he should call me back when we could have a professional conversation,” she wrote.
Instead, Esquivel alleged, the managing editor told her she was not writing enough stories while a reporter and that “others in the newsroom agreed with him … These comments about my job performance seemed aimed not at addressing any of the issues he said he was calling about, but at making me feel diminished.”
She also mentioned a writer who resigned in 2022 because of similar “disparaging behavior” from Becerra and ended the letter with, “I want to know whether the company is going to do anything to put a stop to this.”
Nancy V. Antoniou, Chief Human Resources Officer, responded to Esquivel’s Slack message on Friday, saying that the company “takes employee relations matters seriously” and that posting about it a public channel is “not appropriate.”
Antoniou added, “The assertion that the company has ignored claims of abuse or hostility towards our employees is false.” She maintained that the company had addressed the complaints in the post and that Esquivel’s concerns should remain a “confidential matter.”
Also on Friday, Tang separately emailed the newsroom to address the departing staffers — which you can read in the embedded image above. The email did not address Esquivel’s concerns, but merely said, “I know it’s an emotional day for all of us, as we say farewell to so many valued friends.”
In a statement to TheWrap, Maria L. La Ganga, L.A. Times’ deputy managing editor for California and Metro, defended Becerra for his track record of “inclusivity,” calling Esquivel’s assertions against him “sadly and blatantly wrong.”
“Hector Becerra has a record of inclusivity and support for journalists of color that has been recognized throughout the industry,” Ganga said. “He created the most diverse, most inclusive and strongest Metro desk in the paper’s history.”
In a separate statement, a spokesperson for the L.A. Times told TheWrap, “We generally do not comment on personnel matters. However, we’d like to be clear that any assertion that the company has ignored claims of abuse or hostility towards our employees is false.”
