Analysis: Light’s Out at Signet

is going to have a new CEO in less than 30 days and has essentially replaced all its senior management this year.

The most recent of these messes was The Washington Post’s February story detailing 1,309 pages of sworn statements from former male and female employees who told of a culture where women were discriminated against and sexually harassed.

Here’s the background on this story.

The declarations were part of an ongoing class-action arbitration first filed in 2008 in which female employees accuse the company of pay and promotion discrimination. The arbitration is ongoing and set to go to trial in March 2018.

Now--and Signet has emphasized this point over and over again--there are no claims of sexual harassment in the arbitration.

But the documents the Post reported on earlier this year were filed as part of the case; they had just been under wraps for years.

One of the stipulations of their release was that the names of any specific individuals accused of harassing conduct be redacted because they were not parties to the litigation. Yet there was one name mentioned in Post story--Light’s.

The Post cited a 2013 memorandum filed by the attorneys who represent the women in the pay and promotion discrimination class-action arbitration in which Light, along with a few other executives, are accused of creating a culture were women feel devalued and compelled to acquiesce to sexual advances in order to succeed, and for having sex with female employees.

The story garnered more than 700 comments and was widely covered, not only by the trade but also the consumer media, outlets like USA Today and NBC Nightly News.

A little more than a week after the Post story ran, Signet had its fourth quarter results conference call and Stitzer took the reins from Light, something I can’t recall happening in the nearly 10 years I’ve been covering the company.

For the first 26 minutes of what turned out to be an hour-and-15-minute-long call, Stitzer was on clean-up duty. He ran down the list of issues currently confronting the company, starting with the bombshell Post story, then credit issues and the allegations of stone-swapping at Kay stores.

This is also the call where, as I mentioned above, he pledged the board’s support for Light and the executive management team.

But Stitzer also said this: “Our board is very focused on management’s performance. During the course of a very challenging year, the board and I have become much more actively involved with the business, and we’ll continue this enhanced level of involvement.”

So it’s not at all surprising that the individual picked to succeed Light, Virginia C. Drosos, is a member of the board and not from Signet’s current, and now very much changed, upper ranks.