(Caption removed for reasons of taste and it being waaaaaay too easy to make jokes about this photo)
In honor of American Apparel’s bankruptcy, we thought we’d run down a list of “times (ousted) CEO Dov Charney was skeezy as f*ck.” Sadly, that topic was far too broad because there was just too damn much source material. Over the years, Dov’s admitted to walking around the office in his underwear, is rumored to never flush his toilet, has masturbated at pretty much any time he feels the urge, and is accused of basically sexually harassing and/or assaulting everyone he’s ever known.
In my head, when I hear the name Dov Charney, I think of Jason Mantzoukas’ perfume mogul character Dennis Feinstein from Parks and Rec. Feinstein was like a walking DEEZ NUTS joke — not actually very funny, but entertaining enough that you either dismiss him as harmless or vote for him for president.
But that analogy makes Charney seem more innocuous and palatable than he really was. Particularly when you consider the following five gems (and these are just the non-sex stuff ones):
He compared himself to Woody Allen.
Yes, that’s right. In 2007, in the midst of several sexual harassment lawsuits, Charney thought the appropriate way to express his situation artistically was to take a still frame from Annie Hall and slap “Our Spiritual Leader” above Woody Allen’s head in Yiddish, and then stamp the American Apparel logo on it. This was to parallel Allen’s character’s treatment in the film with how Charney felt he was being treated by the media… or, something. It’s art, man. And political. And totally free speech and not a new scummy way to peddle overpriced leggings!
Allen sued American Apparel for $10 million. American Apparel’s lawyers claimed that because Woody Allen was maybe a pervert, he wasn’t worth paying $10 million. They settled for $5 million, and then Charney’s assistant released a memo saying despite basically calling Woody Allen a child molester (ironic when you consider the reason AA ads constantly got banned), they really, really like Hannah and Her Sisters.
Conducted a management seminar at his grandmother’s funeral.
Dov Charney is actually a Canadian. A French Canadian. In an anonymous interview with Nylon magazine, a former employee of one of American Apparel’s Canadian stores confesses that, some time between 2010 and 2012, Charney held a boot camp for all Canadian store managers, to rally flagging sales. The pow-wow was in Montreal, and during what they thought was going to be a company meal together, things got strange.
He took us all out for dinner one night after we finished for the day (maybe 20 people in total) to a Greek restaurant nearby. We thought it was going to be a company function where we’d talk business. Turns out, his grandmother had just died and his entire extended family was already gathered there. He sat with them and all the employees were sat at a table 30 feet away. We were the only people in the restaurant. It was super weird.
He “phased out” all the employees who actually liked the sweatshop-free appeal of the company.
Okay, this one’s not so much creepy as it is infuriating. (I mean, once you’ve numbed yourself with dozens of stories about how he’s a horrible sexual deviant and everything, this one seems the most WTF-itude of all.) In a 2007 article, Jezebel writer “Moe” detailed the time she worked for an American Apparel flagship store in New York City. While at the same time extolling his views on shoplifting and how subversive it was, he endeavored to rid himself of the hippie-dippie employees who joined the company because of its main appeal:
When I went to work for the company he was in the last stage of purging all the employees who had been attracted to the company for its social agenda; he referred to them as the “WTO” kids, who were “so ’99,” and instructed all his managers to keep a strict “10% rule,” whereby the ugliest/most “WTO” 10% of all retail employees were constantly eased off the schedule.
You read that right. The one redeeming quality of Charney and American Apparel has always been their insistence on not shipping production overseas in a time when 97 percent of our schmatta is outsourced. Also, he is an outspoken supporter of immigration, and hiring immigrants at fair wages (reportedly between $11 and $18 an hour) — a belief that got him in trouble with the government after a federal investigation forced him to fire over 1,500 undocumented workers.
It’s astounding that the one admirable thing about Dov Charney is the thing Dov Charney finds uncool. That’s like Wilt Chamberlain only wanting to hang out with people interested in talking about his volleyball career.
He “adopted” a guy named “Jonny Makeup” from one of his stores.
Jonny Makeup’s Wikipedia page is a whirlwind of desperate glitterati resume padding. He was in a band! He’s perhaps internet famous! He maybe knows Peaches Geldof!
In a 2008 article, Charney admits to keeping his mansion stacked with random American Apparel retail store employees, all of them male, because “boys are easier.” One such roommate was Jonny Makeup, a purple-pants wearing I-guess musician who was window-dressing a local storefront between his band’s gigs and was noticed by Charney. According to an interview in Queerty:
One day he came in for a meeting and I wanted to tell him my idea about being his heiress and he yelled that he didn’t have time to listen to me and I told him, “I like that you yelled at me. You remind me of my daddy.” Then he said, “You look like someone from my family. Like a cousin.” Then I said, “Well, you look like my daddy!”
Jonny went on to apprentice in the P.R. department, which meant “putting together music mixes, updating his MySpace page, making Charney salads, and keeping him company,” along with to this very day referring to Charney as his “Daddy Warbucks.” Jonny even designed a line of clothing for American Apparel… with his own face on it, of course.
Okay, maybe I’d take that guy home to keep me company, too.
He put a billboard of a half-naked 16-year-old in front of her dad’s office.
This one’s perhaps the most “alleged” of all the secondhand knowledge in this listicle (we’ll accept the asterisk if you want to stick one here). Supposedly, allegedly, maybe, perhaps, a friend of a friend, of a person who knew a guy, was working at an American Apparel store and received an angry phone call from an irate father.
“Maybe you could ask Dov Charney something for me,” said Angry Dad. “Maybe you could ask him why there’s a billboard with my 16-year-old daughter half-naked right next to my office. Maybe you could ask him that.”
Sounds apocryphal and maybe not real, but sorta fun to believe.
It’s hard to imagine how Charney’s reign of lechery went on for more than a decade and the board of directors at American Apparel, despite hemorrhaging money for years, were happy to sweep the sexual harassment suits under the rug. It’s even more upsetting that with the decline of American Apparel, the amount of made-in-the-USA clothing available to in the United States shrinks significantly.
Way to take a good thing and rub your c*ck all over it, Dov.
