Woman's Co-Worker Sabotaged Her Work For More Than A Decade To Make Her Think She Was Going Insane
She had to submit to psychiatric evaluations and lost promotions. Now she wants to press charges.
fizkes / Shutterstock.com At one time or another, most of us have had a co-worker who tried to undermine us at every turn. But what one U.K. woman on Reddit experienced is on a whole other level entirely — one that might require legal action.
For over a decade, her co-worker sabotaged her work to make her think she was going insane.
Unfortunately, workplace sabotage is very common.
A study of marketing and advertising executives, for instance, found that nearly a third had experienced a colleague attempting to undermine them. Workplace bullying is even more prevalent — a 2024 survey found that almost half of workers had either witnessed or experienced bullying at work.
But what this woman experienced goes far beyond being undermined or even bullied. The victimization she was subjected to is downright sick, like something out of a movie. In fact, it's basically the office version of what happens in the 1940 movie, "Gaslight," from which the term "gaslighting" arose.
Her co-worker used his IT credentials to hack into her work and change calculations and words.
"Between 2014 and January 2024 I found myself constantly making mistakes while working," the woman wrote in her post. This included everything from calculations being wrong in her spreadsheets, to words in documents being changed to profanities, to booking the wrong dates for vacations.
"I felt like I was going crazy, so I would do things like screenshot what I had calculated," she shared. But when she'd log in the next day, she'd find the screenshots had disappeared. "I was wondering if I ever took them in the first place."
She was forced to undergo mental health and Alzheimer's screenings, missed out on promotions, and experienced other negative impacts.
Her supervisors began to notice of course, and over the years she suffered all kinds of blowback, from being barred from working from home, resulting in £250 in transportation costs every month for years, to being skipped over for promotions.
Photo: fizkes / Shutterstock
Her reputation, of course, was "massively damaged." But the problem was so pervasive that even her supervisors began to think she was losing it. She was forced to undergo medical examinations and assessments for conditions like ADHD and early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.
Her co-worker's sabotage was discovered when he was fired for verbally attacking another woman in the office.
It wasn't until her co-worker's replacement started that she finally discovered what had happened. "The new IT guy over the next two weeks approached me and showed me a series of records," she wrote.
"Bob had been accessing my system, editing my work, and changing the information I had put into my annual leave sheet — among other things."
Suddenly, it all made sense. Bob had been fired for screaming at another woman in the office and was immediately dismissed. As a result, he had left "a significant amount of evidence" of his harassment behind.
"He had tried to chat me up when I first joined the company," she added in a comment. "I refused him, which is why I think this started."
Her situation is very likely illegal in the U.K., where she lives, as well as under U.S. employment law.
If you live in the U.S. and something similar has happened to you, it likely falls under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC's, definition of illegal harassment: "unwelcome conduct" that either "becomes a condition of continued employment" or is "severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive."
Sex and gender identity are among the bases on which behavior can be considered harassment, so this woman's situation seems clear-cut. It's important to note though that this can often be difficult to prove in such cases, according to attorneys.
In the U.K., where this woman lives, the laws are a bit different and not quite as clear as the EEOC's. Still, they also hold a person's employer liable for the harassment, whether they knew about it or not. In the US, employers are only liable if they know about the harassment and fail to stop it.
Other U.K. laws come into play too, though. As several Redditors pointed out, this incident likely falls under the U.K.'s Computer Misuse Act of 1990, which would make Bob's various acts of hacking into and altering this woman's computer files a crime. She also has the option of suing him "in absence" under U.K. law even though he has since left the country.
Here's hoping something can be done about what happened to her. She deserves recompense for what sounds like a truly horrifying decade — and her co-worker needs to be stopped before he does this to another woman.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.