5 People Fired for Telling the Truth

5 The Precarious Department Store

In 1987, a Korean developer named Lee Joon started work on a four-story apartment building. Then, partway through construction, he had a better idea: Instead of apartments, he could turn the whole thing into a department store. His contractors told him that made no sense. 

Load-bearing walls separate the units in an apartment building, and if you’re making a commercial space instead, you’d have to riskily knock those walls down. Plus, you’d have to carve up new holes for escalators. You should have started with a different frame if you wanted to do that. Joon didn’t like this feedback, so he dismissed those contractors and sought out new ones. 

Contractors weren’t the only obstacle. Building codes also banned his plan, but Joon figured out a way around this. He’d be allowed to change this site to a department store if he also built a fifth floor on top of it and installed an ice rink there. That may sound crazy to you, but that’s because you weren’t bribed by Lee Joon. With that hurdle out of the way, it now fell to a new crew of contractors to say this latest plan was even nuttier than the last one. So, Joon fired these guys too and found new new contractors. 

Sampoong Department Store opened in 1990, and it was probably doomed from the start. It became more doomed as time went by, thanks to the building’s practice of piling all the air-conditioning equipment on the roof and dragging it back and forth to weaken the cement. In 1995, visible cracks appeared, and Joon took the precaution of moving merchandise to the basement. Then on June 29th, with managers declaring that a collapse was imminent, Joon still refused to evacuate the place, as it was a particularly good business day. 

The building collapsed that day, killing over 500 people. It was the deadliest building collapse since the Circus Maximus in Rome, almost 2,000 years earlier. Conspiracy theorists figured it had to have been a terrorist attack, because how can a building possibly fall apart like that on its own? 

The building that went on to break Sampoong’s record for fatalities was the World Trade Center six years later. Conspiracy theorists figured that one couldn’t have been a terrorist attack, because whatever the official explanation is, it always has to be something else. 

4 The Prostitution Sting

The way a prostitution sting usually works, an officer gets a sex worker to agree to a deal and then makes an arrest before actually having sex. The history of law enforcement also has its fair share of officers actually having some sort of sex with someone before arresting them. This last tactic was especially popular back in the days of gay stings, when police would get or give oral sex and then book the guy on “solicitation.” 

In 2013, an officer in Fort Smith, Arkansas, observed something like that going on. Sgt. Don Bales saw an affidavit saying that an officer investigating a massage parlor made it a point to fully strip, pay the woman and get properly masturbated by the masseuse before making his arrest. This didn’t seem right. Officers are generally banned from paying for sex in the same way everyone else is, even during an investigation. The only state where they aren’t is Michigan (state motto: “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you”). 

So, Bales snapped a photo of the affidavit. Then he gave it to his attorney. This attorney redacted names and stuck it on his blog, but Bales’ sharing the unredacted version with his attorney broke the law, said the department. He’d put his fellow officer at risk, because if his identity ever got out, well, then he’d been in danger, in danger of not being able to get rub-and-tugs anymore.

They fired Bales. Police can get away with quite a bit, but sharing that affidavit was beyond the pale. 

We don’t know what happened to the massage client officer, but the same year they dismissed Bales, that department arrested a different officer for hiring a sex worker’s services. This was a woman the department had previously arrested for prostitution, and this officer had followed that up by visiting her and hiring her four times. The department discovered this when they picked her up again for an unrelated offense. In his defense, the officer said they’d merely had sex for money and had never kissed in public. 

3 The Salmonella Eggs

In 1988, someone in Britain’s Department of Health made a startling statement. “Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella,” said Edwina Currie. The nation panicked — or at least they started eating fewer eggs, which is as close to panic as British people ever get. Egg consumption suddenly dropped by half. Farmers destroyed 400 million eggs and killed four million hens, not because they were infected but because egg demand had plummeted. 

Edwina Currie (who was now nicknamed “Eggwina” Currie) had done a terrible thing by saying that, said the government. Salmonella outbreaks were rare, so she’d scared people for no reason. They forced her to resign. But according to a report the government had its hands on, but chose to keep from the public till it was leaked the following year, there really were millions of Salmonella infections in the poultry industry, and she’d been right to speak about them. 

Also, she’d never told anyone to panic. She’d said that most of egg production had been affected by salmonella, not that most individual eggs were infected. And the advice she offered related to this was simply to cook eggs. Don’t make mayonnaise with raw eggs or dump raw eggs in your drinks, she said, due to the risk of food poisoning. Many people would say that’s good advice in general. 

Anyway, it definitely ended up being Currie’s biggest scandal of 1988. And this was the same year that she invited Jimmy Saville to run a psychiatric hospital full of teen girls, giving him the keys to all the patients’ rooms. 

2 The Fire-Safe Cigarettes

You will not be terribly surprised if we told you that Philip-Morris fought to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. But besides the long-term health dangers of smoking, we’re talking about the danger of the cigarette setting you on fire, which is real and kills some thousand Americans a year. It’s serious enough that we now have laws about how all cigarettes need to be designed so they extinguish on their own if left unattended. In 1999, Philip-Morris created their own spin on the fire-safe cigarettes:

The new Merit cigarette contained two bands of paper that burned extra-slowly. That meant the cigarette should put itself out if left alone. But then one in-house scientist, Michael Lee Watkins, discovered that maybe they should have given these new smokes less time with the marketing team and more time with the science team. Slow-burning paper meant partly burned tobacco would fall out of the cigarette. The phenomenon was called coal drop-off, and it meant these cigarettes were more likely to set fires, not less. 

They were now getting 40 times as many complaints from customers related to clumps of fire falling off cigarettes than they had before switching the to fire-safe ones. So, Philip-Morris did the reasonable thing and moved Watkins to an office without a phone line, to keep him from calling them or from doing any work at all. Then they fired him. Once he was gone, they quietly changed the paper used in Merit cigarettes to get rid of the coal drop-off issue, while never officially admitting that his points were justified. 

Watkins took his findings to the government, who now made him a witness in their upcoming suit against cigarette companies. The judge ultimately barred him from testifying because the greater lawsuit was about them lying about all the other stuff (nicotine being addictive, smoking causes cancer), so this one thing about fire safety was irrelevant. The judge did go on to rule against the companies. Then they finally got around to settling on what sort of admissions Big Tobacco has to make about smoking. They settled on it in 2022, decades after the suit started. 

1 The BBQ Sauce Bottle

Some companies do some pretty outrageous stuff. But we’re about to tell you about something so heinous that it’s hardly surprising that the employee who blew the whistle faced repercussions. You see, at the end of 2019, a hardware company in Canada gifted an employee a bottle of BBQ sauce for the holidays. 

“What kind of multi-billion dollar company gifts its Canadian employees barbecue sauce as a holiday gift?” posted the employee, Hussien Mehaidli, to Twitter. He posted this from a burner account because this is the sort of earth-shaking scandal a company might seek to bury through any means possible. 

His paranoia was valid and, in fact, was insufficient: His boss identified him as the anonymous poster. A few days later, they fired him for “violation of standards of conduct policy.” 

You hear people on social media regularly sharing stories about being fired for dumb reasons like this, and without hearing the other side of the story, we have to decide for ourselves whether to believe them. In this case, the news media followed up on it and got the CEO of the company (which really is worth billions of dollars) to confirm they’d fired Mehaidli for that. And maybe the firing was a little extreme, conceded the CEO, but he wasn’t going to overrule the decision. 

The original complaint might sound to you like a grievance from an employee who was expecting a cash bonus and was frustrated at receiving this instead. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. Mehaidli was expecting to receive food as a holiday gift. He’d just been expecting better food, like the company had given in years past. 

“You’d get cookies, M&Ms, beef jerky — a box filled with junk food,” he said, wistfully recalling the hamper of 2013. “We always really appreciated that.” 

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