Brave Uber whistleblower breaks her silence to warn of 'smear campaign'

Susan Fowler Rigetti became a whistleblower Sunday when she published a blog post describing the sexist work culture and oppressive management style she experienced while at Uber.

Since then, other women stepped forward with similar stories and the company's investors are now demanding action. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick held an all-hands meeting Tuesday, in which he promised change throughout the company, and announced that he'd enlisted former US Attorney General Eric Holder with conducting an investigation into the matter.

But the "smear campaign" against Fowler has begun, she said in a tweet Friday afternoon:

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This tweet is the first time Fowler has tweeted since she thanked people for their support shortly after posting her original story.

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Fowler's original tweet about her story received 22,000 retweets, and set off a furious news cycle about her claims.

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Over the last week, her name's become synonymous not just with alleged company-wide gender discrimination at Uber, but within startup culture at-large.

Uber itself has even named Fowler in emails to users, in response to customers who specifically referenced the latest allegations when cancelling their accounts. The number of account-deletion requests following the publication of Fowler's blog post have been low, according to an Uber spokesperson.

That doesn't mean the world is completely against Uber—some employees who work there have started to come out in defense of the company over the last week. In response to "What do engineers at Uber think of Susan Fowler Rigetti's blogpost of her year at Uber?" on Quora, Travis Addair, a senior software engineer at Uber, wrote:

"I personally suspect that Susan's account is accurate from her perspective, but I also suspect there's more to this story that even she was not aware of. But that's just speculation on my part, at the end of the day I don't know any more than anyone else."

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment when asked whether they have been in touch with Fowler directly. If they do, we'll update the story here.