New Account of S-xual Abuse - MP’s SIL - post regarding Nike Inc. layoffs

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New account of toxic Nike culture comes from Mark Parker’s onetime sister-in-law, a former employee

Updated: Apr. 14, 2024, 6:17 a.m.|Published: Apr. 14, 2024, 6:00 a.m.
By Matthew Kish | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Pam Parker walked into a Nike manager’s hotel room expecting a business meeting. She was at a Nike work gathering about three decades ago and shortly into her career at the company. Employees often used private spaces to talk numbers.

After she entered the room, she said, the manager locked the door, pinned her against a wall, and forcefully started to kiss her.

Parker is a former sister-in-law of Mark Parker, Nike’s executive chairman and former CEO. In 2022, she signed a statement about her experiences at Nike.

The document, which Parker provided last year to a reporter for this story, is a blistering account of her time at Nike and smashes one of corporate America’s strongest codes of silence. While numerous women have come forward since 2018 with claims about inappropriate s-xual behavior at Nike, Parker is the first with a direct tie to the company’s corner office and boardroom.

Mark Parker is a popular figure at Nike. He joined the company in 1979 and worked his way up, becoming CEO in 2006 and executive chairman in 2020. Since last year, he’s also served as executive chairman of the Walt Disney Corp., making him one of corporate America’s top executives. At the time of the hotel incident Pam Parker alleges, he was a general manager and did not know her.

Pam Parker recently divorced Bob Parker, one of Mark’s brothers. She said her statement, signed under penalty of perjury, isn’t aimed at the Parker family. She said she didn’t tell Mark Parker about the alleged as--ult until three years ago.

“I still love my family,” she said. “This is not a family story. This is a Nike story.”

Parker’s account is filled with details that support the accounts of other women who have come forward with claims about the company being a “boys’ club,” a problem that Nike’s worked to address. She is not part of an ongoing s-x discrimination lawsuit against the company, but her claims echo those of the plaintiffs.

Her statement also includes explosive new allegations. In addition to the hotel room incident, she claims she observed pr-------es at a Nike event and on work travel abroad, and she says she witnessed human resources efforts to protect top executives.

Parker’s account also is notable because she claims the company’s top leaders fueled its wayward culture, contrary to the company’s 2018 insistence that the problems stemmed from an “an insular group of high-level managers” who “protected each other and looked the other way.”

“During my tenure at Nike, I experienced a work environment that was hostile, demeaning and misogynistic towards female employees,” Parker wrote, adding the company’s “senior leadership … set the tone for the toxic work environment I was forced to endure.”

Early last week, The Oregonian/OregonLive provided Nike detailed, written questions for this story. A spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the questions, but the company has not answered them.

During its reporting for this story, The Oregonian/OregonLive also reached out for comment to an attorney for the plaintiffs in the discrimination lawsuit, after which the attorney inadvertently disclosed documents that remain under seal. After a two-month legal battle, Judge Marco Hernández on Tuesday affirmed an earlier ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo that the First Amendment protects The Oregonian/OregonLive’s rights to report on the documents.

The decision has been stayed during an appeal, and the documents were not used for this report.

The Oregonian/OregonLive also spoke with roughly two dozen current and former Nike employees about their experiences at the company. Most insisted on anonymity because they still work in the industry or because they fear retribution.

They largely corroborated one of Parker’s key claims, that Nike’s problems stemmed from the executive level, not from a small group of toxic managers.

“It wasn’t mid-level, junior-level folks,” said a former Nike vice president.

The current and former Nike employees also spoke with affection about the company’s purpose and core values. They used words like “magical,” “treasured,” and “a dream” to describe elements of working at the company. They, as cofounder Phil Knight has in the past, likened it to Disney, which views itself as a force for good.

Nike, after all, is built around physical activity, competitive excellence and bringing people together. The company has long been known for inspirational advertising. Since Knight sold his first shoes in 1964, Nike has created more than 80,000 corporate jobs, more than a million factory jobs, helped open countries to trade, boosted developing economies and played a hand in countless indelible sports moments.

“Of all the things that ever got created by humans in a capitalistic world, this thing is a gem,” said a former Nike employee, who like others spoke about the company’s positives and negatives.

Nike’s created a $40.9 billion fortune for Knight, the largest in Oregon history, and one that’s increasingly ending up in the hands of a research hospital, the state’s universities and civic organizations.

But the current and former employees agreed there’s a downside to the company’s maniacal competitiveness and hard-partying roots, including behavior that surfaces on work trips, which Pam Parker alleges she experienced repeatedly.

“When you work hard, it’s nice to have that play hard element as well,” a former Nike employee said. “But there has to be a line. There has to be a way to maintain that fraternal culture without women taking such a big hit and being in such uncomfortable situations. That’s the shame in it all. The culture has so much spirit. But somehow, along the line, it sort of lost its way.”

As part of its defense in the lawsuit, Nike publicly filed statements from two dozen female employees, also under penalty of perjury, who described work experiences much different than Parker’s.

“I do not feel like my gender has ever impacted my pay, performance ratings, or promotional opportunities at Nike,” one female employee wrote, “and I do not think I have been treated any differently by my managers because of my gender.”

Parker said she signed her statement to stand with the women who filed the lawsuit. She hasn’t joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff.

“I want nothing from this,” she said.
Former Nike employee Pam Parker with Bo Jackson
Early in her Nike career, Pam Parker met Nike endorser, and two-sport all-star, Bo Jackson.

‘Everyone was drawn to it’

Pam Parker, known as Pam Shrader when she joined Nike in 1989, was born in Portland. Her dad owned car dealerships in several states. She went to school at the University of Arizona.

Parker remembers walking through a snowstorm to get to her Nike job interview.

“Nike liked the tenacity,” she said. “I got called the next day and got the job.”

The company was nowhere near the $50 billion, 83,000-employee colossus it is today. It had less than $2 billion in sales and employed around 4,500. The first phase of Nike’s now-400-acre corporate campus wouldn’t open for another year.

But while it lacked the trappings of the Fortune 100, it reverberated with purpose. Sports galvanized the workplace. Parker, who’s run 15 marathons, ran on the company’s first Hood to Coast relay teams for women and once joked with two-sport all-star Bo Jackson at Nike’s Wilsonville distribution center.

At first, she worked in the credit department, a cubicle job that consisted of collections and reviewing the financial statements of Nike’s vendors. She considered leaving, but a coworker encouraged her to stick it out.

“And I did,” she said. “It changed my life.”

Eventually, Parker, who sprinkles conversations with humor, came to embrace the company’s iconoclastic roots and describe herself as “Nike irreverent,” a nod to a favorite early Nike advertising campaign about the company’s rebellious attitude. She described long hours at the office, sometimes working well past midnight, then being back at 7 a.m.

“Everyone was so drawn to it,” she said. “You could come in at 4 in the morning and there’d be people there.”

Parker still has a copy of former executive Rob Strasser’s principles, a foundational statement of Nike’s values that frequently resurfaces on social media. She has old Nike trading cards and posters. She has a rare pair of Nike equestrian boots from the Olympics. She wore a pair of Nike FlyEase sneakers when she met with a reporter in New York City’s Central Park.

“We all knew we were doing something special,” she said about the company’s early days, pointing to goosebumps on her arm as she talked.

But Nike’s rambunctious corporate culture came with a downside.

Parker’s “first taste of yikes” came at the Beer Relays, an annual alcohol-drenched Nike athletic outing that began in 1980, according to “Swoosh,” an unauthorized Nike biography. The book describes an early Nike executive wearing “plastic glasses and a nose in the shape of a pe--s” to the event.

“It was a bacchanal,” Parker said.

Nike no longer hosts the Beer Relays.

‘Pr-------es waiting to serve them’

After a few years, Parker started working with product, the lifeblood of the company. She became a development manager, which meant she worked as part of the team that collaborated with overseas factories and brought the creations of Nike footwear designers to life.

The work took her to Asia, where Nike works with contract factories, including in Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and China.

On one of those trips, Parker went out for drinks at night with her coworkers. She said she felt going to dinner was part of the job and there was pressure to drink. She found herself in a bar with 15-20 women with numbers on their hips, she said. As she recalled, her male coworkers would point at a woman, then leave the room with her.

It seemed plain to her, the only female Nike employee at the bar, that the women were pr-------es.

“I don’t know why they would even think that would be enjoyable for me,” she said.

Parker did not report the alleged hiring of pr-------es on a work trip because she loved her job and didn’t want to lose it.

“I finally had my dream job,” she said. “You have this job you love and these people you love. You start calling foul like that and suddenly you’re off the team. I could not imagine a future of me not being at Nike.”

Current and former Nike employees who spoke with The Oregonian/OregonLive said work trips usually include an after-hours dinner, and there’s pressure to attend. They offered varying accounts of what happens afterwards. Some groups keep it clean while others go to inappropriate extremes, sometimes fueled by alcohol.

A 2018 civil rights complaint against Nike claims an employee described offsite meetings as “HR free zones” and bragged about visiting strip clubs when traveling for business.

In April 2022, The Oregonian/OregonLive, Business Insider and the Portland Business Journal intervened in the discrimination lawsuit and argued for the public interest in unsealing more records in the case. Many documents associated with the case were withheld from the public record, or partially redacted, under a protective order, a common legal mechanism in lawsuits that include sensitive information, such as complaints filed with human resources.

In September 2022, a judge ruled in favor of the news outlets. Roughly 5,000 pages of documents were unsealed in late 2022. The documents included 10 of the “Starfish” surveys, a self-administered effort to collect first-hand accounts of female Nike employees with s-xual harassment and discrimination allegations.

One of the surveys in that release, submitted anonymously, described “men sloppy drunk putting their arms around a waitress and/or female coworkers on work travel.” It also claimed men try to “sleep with women in their function at lower levels by luring them in through the promise of a ‘work dinner.’”

“It’s a total abuse of money and power,” a former Nike employee told The Oregonian/OregonLive, who claimed she endured inappropriate advances by higher-ups. “It’s a very weird power dynamic.”

On other trips to Asia, Parker said chauffeurs would drive male Nike employees to karaoke bars, known as coffee houses, and the employees would get escorted to private rooms filled with “pr-------es waiting to serve them,” according to her statement.

Dan Fulton, a long-time veteran of the sneaker industry’s Asian operations, recalled many a long workday that would end with a couple of cars at the factory gate that would transport top managers and U.S. footwear employees to the local karaoke bar.

“It wasn’t uncommon” for hostesses to greet the newcomers and sit with them if invited, Fulton said. He said the hostess would do just about whatever their customer wanted – a friendly conversation or s-x in a back room. “No one can deny it.”

“They were provided by the factory owner,” said Fulton, who added he didn’t participate.

Nike doesn’t own the factories that make its shoes.

The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke with three additional footwear veterans who said pr-------es were made available to Nike workers on trips to Asia.

“What happens in Asia, stays in Asia,” said one of them, who added inappropriate behavior is increasingly rare and it also happens at other sportswear companies.

In her statement, Parker claims a Nike marketing manager told her about taking Nike-sponsored athletes on a trip to Mexico to have s-x with pr-------es. She also claims to have attended a Nike-organized event in the Bahamas in January 2010 at which she watched 15 to 20 “high-end pr-------es” discreetly walk into the room and line up against a wall.

“I then watched as some of the high-profile male athletes in attendance walked over to the women, selected one and then left the event with them,” Parker wrote in the statement.

Pam Parker attended the event with her husband Bob Parker, who declined to comment for this story.

The Oregonian/OregonLive has not been able to corroborate the claim, but a 2018 workplace survey, unsealed in response to the legal challenge by The Oregonian/OregonLive and others, notes events for Nike VIPs had “secret areas,” and “expectations on entertainment.”
Pam Parker runs in New York City's Central Park.
Pam Parker ran on Nike's first Hood to Coast relay teams for women.

‘Scared to death’

In 2020, Pam Parker drafted a letter to Mark Parker about what happened in the Florida hotel room, which she says took place around 1995. She never sent the letter, but she shared a copy with The Oregonian/OregonLive. In the letter, Pam Parker described the moment she realized she wasn’t in the manager’s hotel room for a business meeting.

“I felt the blood run from my face,” she wrote. “I can’t describe to you the horrific feeling I had in my gut. I didn’t know what to say, I was scared to death thinking quickly. I felt like I had to stay or my career was over.”

“Losing my job was nothing compared to losing my dignity,” Parker wrote. “I went for the door and when I tried to get out, the door was locked with a security bolt or chain, I can’t remember which. I was so flustered it was difficult to get out. By that time (he) was at the door and he banged it shut from the small crack I had opened with the security chain on. He pushed me against the door and force kissed me. He slammed his body against mine. Please remember, I weighed only 110 pounds at the time. I struggled to get away and pushed him as hard as I could. He relented and let me out.”

The account is broadly consistent with the signed statement she wrote two years later.

Parker claims over the next 24 hours she told three Nike coworkers and the company’s human resources department about what happened. The three Nike coworkers did not return repeated messages.

The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke with a former coworker of Parker’s who described Parker’s alleged assailant as “creepy” and said she recalled hearing years later that something happened to Parker at work, but the former coworker didn’t know of any details. The former coworker came up with Parker’s name, and the name of her alleged assailant, independently in response to questions about whether she knew of any inappropriate s-xual behavior at Nike around 1995.

“I could visibly see that something was not right with Pam,” the former coworker said.

Chris Sackmaster, Pam Parker’s brother, said she told him about the alleged as--ult within a day of it happening.

“Pam was very upset,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “She told me that she had been going to a bunch of meetings … and this gentleman invited her back to the room, ostensibly to do some additional work,” but then she’d been “groped” and “violated.”

Sackmaster described his sister as loyal to the Parker family.

“This is a real challenge for her,” he said, about Pam Parker’s decision to tell her story.

In 2023, Parker requested her personnel file from Nike, which she expected would have information about how she was “locked in a hotel room and molested” by a Nike manager, according to emails she provided The Oregonian/OregonLive. A Nike HR representative responded and said the file had been destroyed three years earlier, pursuant to the company’s records retention policy.

Pam Parker isn’t the first Nike employee or athlete to allege s-xual as--ult.

In her 2023 memoir, former Nike runner Kara Goucher claimed Alberto Salazar se-----y as--ulted her. Salazar, who coached elite Nike runners and once had a building named after him on the company’s campus, denied the allegation.

Nike parted with Salazar in 2019 after he got a lifetime ban for s-xual as--ult.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported on the alleged s-xual as--ult of a Nike employee by the soccer star Neymar, who at the time was sponsored by Nike. The article included a comment from Nike’s top lawyer describing the complaint as “credible” and noted Nike continued to use Neymar in marketing campaigns after the complaint was made.

Neymar denied the allegation. Nike ended its relationship with him in 2020.

During its reporting for this article, The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke with a former Nike employee who claimed to have been se-----y as--ulted at work. The former employee showed The Oregonian/OregonLive contemporaneous documents to support the claim.

Publicly available exhibits in the ongoing lawsuit include additional claims about aggressive s-xual behavior, including a copy of an HR complaint by a former female employee, and former plaintiff in the lawsuit, who claimed her manager put his “cr---h” in her face and made a comment about “su-king his di-k.”

Current and former employees told The Oregonian/OregonLive they endured and witnessed inappropriate physical contact and violations of personal space, including by executives.

Former Nike employee Jessica Junkins, another former plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she endured leering, remarks tinged with s-xual innuendo and “constant touching” of her arms, shoulders and back in the workplace, including by veteran managers.

She said the harassment started within her first week. Junkins said she confided in a few peers and the responses ranged from, “He’s just a touchy-feely guy,” to “You should take advantage of the situation,” to one that she heard repeatedly: “Welcome to Nike.”

Junkins said one manager “pushed his lower body, his waist and his pelvis,” against her as she was seated on a stool at a work table and another put his hand on her bare leg during a bus ride back from a work retreat. She had attended the retreat in Bend to try to get to know her co-workers better, but she said a manager kept following her around and made her feel “like she was being stalked.”

The 46-year-old Portland woman started work at Nike in 2016.

“The feeling was, I’m stuck in a bad 1980-ish high school movie — like these guys think this is a frat house,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Junkins said she got so tired of a manager staring at her chest in the workplace and the inappropriate touching that she changed how she dressed.

“I stopped wearing makeup,” she said. “I started wearing baggy clothes.”

Junkins said she first shared her concerns with Nike’s human resources in 2016 when someone else filed a complaint. She then filed her own complaint with Nike’s human resources in 2018, and then again in 2019 with Nike’s employee relations, but she said little was done.

“You know he’s been here a really long time,” she said a human resources employee told her in 2018 after she had named a Nike manager who she said had behaved inappropriately.

Junkins left Nike in 2022.

“People notice this is going on, but nobody wants to deal with it,” she said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Former Nike employee Emily Tucker described her 18 years at Nike as the “best of times” and the “worst of times.”

Around 2014, she attended a Nike-sponsored party with an open bar. She claimed she witnessed a Nike vice president position himself inappropriately close to a female subordinate.

“Considering he was many clicks above her on the org chart, he proceeded to flirt with her in a room full of Nike employees, including other executives, where he was the highest-level person in the room,” Tucker said. “He was demonstrably comfortable with his actions and the power dynamic at hand. My colleague and I saw what was happening and we were compelled to insert ourselves physically between them to pull her away.”

Tucker said the event changed how she looked at Nike leadership.

She left the company in 2018 after she discovered a male colleague, with a similar rank and tenure, made $37,000 more in annual salary. She also claimed she was paid less than the minimum for her job. Tucker said she was one of the 7,000 Nike workers who got a raise in 2018 after an internal pay review.

“I really loved Nike, until I discovered that Nike did not love me back,” she said.

‘Did nothing’ to protect her

In her statement, Parker claims Nike’s human resources “did nothing” to protect her from her alleged assailant.

Parker claims she called Nike human resources the day after the alleged as--ult and filed a report. When she got home to Oregon, she claims Nike human resources reached out to her with the name of her alleged assailant, a detail which she had withheld. She claims Nike human resources had already spoken with her alleged assailant and he said Parker had a crush on him.

“I don’t even the use word ‘crush,’” Parker told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “That’s like third grade stuff.”

In her statement, Parker claims a Nike human resources representative told her the company got reports of around 20 similar “incidents” a month, involving various people, but it took “no action” on her complaint.

In 2003, Pam Parker married Bob Parker, one of Mark Parker’s brothers. Nike’s 2016 proxy statement describes Bob Parker as a marketplace director with more than 25 years of experience at the company. He’s now retired.

In 2012, Pam Parker filed a separate complaint with Nike human resources about behavior that she claimed violated company policy and also affected her husband. At the time, she worked for Nike’s Cole Haan brand.

In her statement, she alleges she was told the company would investigate, but the company “would not document anything” given her close connection to Nike’s top executive.

“Nike HR did all of this to protect my husband (and by extension, his brother, then Nike’s CEO), and did absolutely nothing to protect me,” Pam Parker wrote in her statement.

Parker provided The Oregonian/OregonLive notes she emailed herself in 2012 after a conversation with a Nike HR representative. In the notes, Parker wrote that the complaint was elevated to “high-profile” status “because Parkers are involved.”

“I was told that very few people in HR were advised of the complaint and it was kept under wraps,” Parker wrote in the 2012 email. She also wrote that she “expressed (her) criticism that HR should handle this situation as any other complaint at Nike.”

The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke with four former Nike employees who gave examples of executives getting a light disciplinary touch.

Parker got laid off in 2013 when Nike sold its Cole Haan brand, where she worked as a senior product developer.

She marked the occasion by hiking the nearly 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail.
Mark Parker
Mark Parker joined Nike in 1979 and worked his way up to become CEO, then executive chairman. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, 2016)

‘I lost my family’

In late 2021, Pam Parker texted Mark Parker and told him she had been “se-----y harassed” by a Nike employee while she worked for the company. She had read an article about the discrimination lawsuit and wanted to share her voice.

“I thought, ‘He’s in a position to make change,’” she said.

Mark Parker, who was not CEO at the time of the alleged as--ult, but who in 2021 served in his current role as executive chairman, called her immediately, Pam Parker said. They spoke at length.

Pam Parker acknowledged her story puts Mark Parker in a difficult spot given his split loyalties to his family and Nike. She has fond memories of her former brother-in-law, including family trips to Cape Cod, where several members of the Parker family own homes, and where she took kayaks out with Mark.

Mark Parker had a largely successful run as Nike CEO, but the end of his tenure was marked by the first criticisms about a toxic workplace and questions about his relationship with disgraced running coach Alberto Salazar.

In 2018, he apologized for the cultural problems and promised change. Although current and former employees said that work isn’t finished, Nike’s latest corporate responsibility report shows statistical improvement, including that 44% of Nike leadership positions are now held by women, an 8 percentage-point increase since Parker’s apology. The company also now ties executive compensation to diversity and inclusion goals.

“Mark took it to heart,” a current employee said about his response to the “boys’ club” criticisms. “The man cares.”

On the phone call, Pam Parker told Mark Parker how she was treated at Nike, including the alleged as--ult. But she said it was “business Mark, not brother-in-law Mark” on the other end of the phone.

“All he wanted to know was if there was anybody still at Nike who was there at that time,” Pam Parker told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “That’s when I shut down … All I wanted to hear him say is, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, and I can’t believe this happened to someone in my own family.’”

The conversation left her “gutted.”

“I don’t hold him responsible for what happened to me,” Pam Parker said. “I love Mark. He was always generous and giving. I don’t hold him responsible for any of this. What broke my heart is when I tried to reach out to him, I was any other employee.”

In May 2022, Parker signed her statement about her time at Nike.

In the statement, she wrote that she’s “lived with the regret that my fear of retaliation kept me from doing more to fight the gender-based mistreatment and harassment I experienced while at Nike.”

About a month after she signed her statement, Pam Parker was on Cape Cod. Pam recalled seeing Mark Parker at the end of a driveway owned by another Parker family member.

“Mark always would run up and give me a big hug,” Pam Parker said. “But he just turned around and walked down the driveway. That was the day I lost my family.”

– Matthew Kish covers business, including the sportswear and banking industries. Reach him at 503-221-4386, mkish@oregonian.com or on X @matthewkish.

Maxine Bernstein and Jeff Manning contributed to this report.

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