- Bon Appétit's Sohla El-Waylly says she told Adam Rapoport to resign as editor in chief during an all-staff Zoom meeting.
- Rapoport had called the meeting to apologize after a photo of him in brownface resurfaced on June 8.
- El-Waylly told the "Sporkful" host, Dan Pashman, that Rapoport then tried to end the call. That's when she said: "I think it's crazy that you think you can do anything now but resign."
- It was the moment that "got the conversation started," El-Waylly said. Hours later, Rapoport officially stepped down from his top post at the
food publication.
After a photo of Adam Rapoport in brownface resurfaced last week, he called a Zoom meeting with the entire staff of Bon Appétit.
The editor in chief apologized, saying he didn't realize "how this might affect people."
"It was like a couple of sentences, and then there was a pause and no one spoke," Sohla El-Waylly, an assistant editor at Bon Appétit, told Dan Pashman on his podcast, "The Sporkful." "And he was like, 'OK, let's wrap this meeting up.'"
"And I was like: 'Absolutely not, you should resign. I think it's crazy that you think you can do anything now but resign."'
—UNIONIZE CONDE, FAST (@tammieetc) June 8, 2020
It was the moment that "got the conversation started," El-Waylly said. Hours later, Rapoport officially stepped down from his top post at the food publication.
The first domino to fall for Bon Appétit
In the photo, originally taken years earlier, Rapoport was wearing a Halloween costume meant to stereotypically resemble a Puerto Rican. The photo's posting on Twitter by the food writer Tammie Teclemariam cascaded into a shake-up at Bon Appétit.
Inflammatory social-media posts by the editor Alex Delany quickly resurfaced as well, along with homophobic and racist tweets by Matt Duckor, a vice president at Condé Nast who had overseen Bon Appétit's video content. Duckor later resigned as well.
—noah (@noahadamz) June 9, 2020
An article by Business Insider's Rachel Premack — who interviewed 14 current and former Bon Appétit employees who all identified as people of color — further shed light on the culture at the company, which has become beloved in recent years for its popular Test Kitchen videos and the personalities who star in them — including El-Waylly.
But El-Waylly said she was never compensated for her appearances in the videos and accused the company of paying only white editors extra for their work on the YouTube channel.
"What frustrates me is that, we have this image of being this really diverse team and this really inclusive club, but there's no equity there," El-Waylly told Pashman. "There's some people who get paid huge, huge amounts for their appearances on camera. And people of color, we were either paid nothing — such as myself and Gaby [Melian] and Christina [Chaey], we've never been paid for video — or very nominal amounts, like $200."
"They kind of treat us like side characters to pull in the name of diversity," she added. "Like they have Christina come in when [Chris] Morocco is making Korean short ribs."
A representative from Condé Nast pushed back on the claim that people of color on the video team were paid less than their white counterparts, telling Insider: "It's simply not true to say that any employee is not paid for their work."
Silence followed by dialogue
When El-Waylly called on Rapoport to resign, she said, few of the white staff members participating in the Zoom meeting spoke up initially.
"What happened was, 40 people on the Zoom meeting, half of them were not showing their faces," she said. "Then it was just like me, a couple other people of color, and one white girl who were speaking, and I just kind of snapped."
"This is why this s--- happens," El-Waylly recalled telling her coworkers. "Everyone's hiding, half of you are hiding, most of you aren't saying anything. You post all this stuff on Instagram about pretending to care, but now's the time where we can actually make a difference and no one is speaking up."
"Then the white people started talking," El-Waylly told Pashman. "They just needed to be yelled at. It shouldn't happen that way, it really shouldn't."
Going public
After the Zoom meeting, El-Waylly decided it was finally time to go public with what had been happening behind the scenes at Bon Appétit.
She took to Instagram and said she had been hired in 2019 on a $50,000 salary to "assist mostly white editors with significantly less experience than me" yet was never paid for the additional Test Kitchen appearances that she said she was pushed into "as a display of diversity."
—Sarah Manavis (@sarahmanavis) June 8, 2020
It was a moment of personal reckoning for El-Waylly, who has 15 years of experience as a chef and restaurateur.
"My whole life I felt like I was getting these jobs or this salary because I didn't deserve more, that I wasn't good enough, like maybe I do need to work for 20 years to get to a job that takes a white person two years to get to," she told Pashman. "But it just made me realize that I don't want people to make me feel like this anymore. I should feel like I'm equal."
Hope for a new contract
An hour after she posted on Instagram, El-Waylly said, Condé Nast's Duckor finally offered her a new contract — which she said she'd been asking for every week for months while shooting videos during the coronavirus pandemic.
"Since we've been working from home, I've been shooting more videos than ever, and we're doing it on our own," she said. "We're the sound guy, we're the video guy, we're the food stylist, we're the dishwasher, so it's a significant amount of work. And every week I keep telling them: 'When are you going to pay me? When are you going to pay me?'"
"And I have a talk with Duckor like once a week, he looks me through the Zoom eyes, and he tells me: 'It's coming tomorrow, I swear. It's tied up in legal, it's coming tomorrow, just finish this shoot.' He did that to me for months."
The people of color who work on Bon Appétit's video team are now negotiating new deals, and the Test Kitchen staff is refusing to shoot new content until the pay disparity has been fixed, El-Waylly said.
"None of us are going back to work until everybody gets paid, this is not just about me," she added. "Everyone who does video for the Test Kitchen should get compensated, because it's the most lucrative thing that Condé Nast has."
It has no doubt been a roller coaster of a week at Bon Appétit, one that El-Waylly said had given her "some of the highest highs of my life."
"When Adam resigned, when Duckor resigned, and when that Business Insider article came out, I finally felt like I wasn't just screaming in the wind anymore," she said. "I feel like, finally, things might change."
She added: "I always grew up believing I would always experience casual racism and that's just a fact of life and there's no way around it. But I finally think that, maybe, we don't have to anymore."
You can listen to El-Waylly's full interview on "The Sporkful" here
- Read more:
- The editor in chief of Bon Appétit has resigned after a photo of him in brownface resurfaced
- A Bon Appétit editor has apologized after a photo of a Confederate-flag cake he made resurfaced
- Bon Appétit's editor in chief just resigned — but staffers of color say there's a 'toxic' culture of microaggressions and exclusion that runs far deeper than one man
- The internet is rallying behind Bon Appétit's Sohla El-Waylly after she accused the publication of pay inequity