A total of three higher-level executives at MedMen – a Southern California-based company – have quit after alleged claims of financial duress, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.
Chief Operating Officer Ben Cook, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications Daniel Li, and General Counsel Lisa Sergi Trager, all of whom served on the company’s board, have recently resigned. Additionally, a few members of the company’s technology and design teams were let go. MedMen is shuffling employees around in an attempt to become more ‘efficient’ under CEO Adam Beirman. These changes were confirmed in a press release. last Friday morning.
“We appreciate the contributions of all current and former MedMen team members as we work to build the world’s leading cannabis company, and I have the utmost confidence in the management team. Their expertise, skill set and experience sets the standard of excellence for the industry,” Bierman said in the release.
The company operates 19 cannabis facilities in five different states – Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, and New York – and has positioned itself as one the country’s leading multistate cannabis companies. The facilities range from cultivation to retail and employ over 1,000 people. They have plans to expand to more states and Canada, where they are already publicly traded on the Canadian Securities Exchange.
The current employee shakedown follows a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed by former Chief Financial Officer, James Parker, who also detailed examples of overspending and a hostile work environment. According to Parker’s suit: “the work environment was replete with racial, homophobic and misogynistic epithets and slurs, drug and alcohol abuse, personal humiliation occasioned by the words and deeds of the CEO and President of the company [and] profligate spending by both the CEO and President.”
MedMen claims the lawsuit is unsubstantiated and denies all allegations. We have reached out to the company for further comments and will update the article with their reply.
These changes were confirmed by the company as necessary for fiscal prudence. You can’t link this to allegations made in a lawsuit filed last year just to spice up your headline. The two are not related and all three staff left on good terms with the company. Did you think about reaching out to them for comment?
As of now, no one has made any public comments about the nature of these resignations so we don’t know if they left on good terms or not. Either way, we reached out to MedMen for a comment on this and are currently waiting for their reply.