GRAVITY PAYMENTS SECOND IN COMMAND Tammi Kroll REFUSES TO ADDRESS DAN PRICE ABUSE ALLEGATIONS

Ignorance is not having enough knowledge, understanding or information about something — emphasis on the word “enough” — but pleading ignorance is not an automatic escape hatch in the eyes of the law.

Multiple women have waged credible, consistent allegations against famed Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, including rape and assault. Multiple Gravity employees have detailed Price’s consistent emotional abuse, whether at intimate gatherings or all-hands-on-deck meetings.

One of those employees, however, has remained curiously close-mouthed.

Tammi Kroll was Vice President of Production Operations at First Data until 2011. She left to become Vice President of Production Operations at Yahoo until 2015.

Kroll apparently had an epiphany in 2015. She said she took an 80% pay cut to join Gravity as chief operating officer. “My whole goal when I went to school was to make more money. Money doesn’t make you happy, doesn’t make you a better person.”

Kroll’s Gravity salary is at least $275,000, six times the average annual wage. Such a wage is certainly more than enough to bolster the happiness index for roughly 45% of Americans who believe they are underpaid. After all, Kroll’s boss is rather obsessed with delivering a raft of wage inequity diatribes to millions of his disciples.

One might argue that Price bought the boundless obedience — and even silence — of his employees when he finally raised their abysmal wages in 2015 after years of attrition and morale battles while he raked in millions. Lucas, Price’s brother and business co-founder, certainly saw it that way.

At the same time that Price raised wages, he also demanded that employees sign an updated non-disclosure agreement rife with far more stringent non-disparagement terms — a red flag if there ever was one.

With fewer than 200 employees, Gravity is defined as a “small business.” By contrast, Yahoo employs roughly 9,000, First Data employs 22,000. Despite his company’s size, Price admitted to hauling in well over a million each year. He claims to have reduced that salary to the company-wide minimum of $70K. Insiders have said that is simply not true.

But what does seem to be true is that Kroll steers the ship while Price watches offshore. As one former employee said to Hundred Eighty Degrees, “Tammi runs the company. She is happy to keep all the plates spinning while Dan basks in the fanfare.”

Millions see Dan Price as the face and voice of Gravity Payments. Only a spoonful of folks, however, know that Kroll is the real Oz behind the curtain. It is therefore confounding, if not unrealistic, for someone to run a company without abundant knowledge of that company’s goings on, especially with an unobstructed view from the C-suite.

Without exception, among the dozens upon dozens of former Gravity employees who have spoken with Hundred Eighty Degrees, a considerable sum of whom occupied senior management roles, not one has denied how Price brutally bullies staffers.

Surely, it follows that Kroll is aware of such behavior.

But if she truly spins all of the company’s plates, it fails to reason that she does not possess knowledge of or understand such unbridled cruelty. It simply means that she likely “chooses” to ignore it.

Hundred Eighty Degrees has repeatedly attempted to ask Kroll about Price’s apparent workplace savagery, let alone his longtime fraud scheme, according to an extensive investigation.

More importantly, Kroll refuses to address how multiple women have accused Price of rape, assault, theft and other alleged felonies.

Multiple news outlets, including this one, previously addressed how Price had allegedly beaten ex-wife Kristie Colón for years. In response, Price did what he always does — deny and deflect.

He established a series on the Gravity website titled Women in Leadership. He wrote an arguably tone deaf diatribe about #MeToo. And, he occasionally dapples his Twitter feed with myopic posts about a woman’s susceptibility to big, bad gender-biased data collecting giants.

Publicly writing about the vile treatment of women is hardly apt punishment for privately carrying out such malevolence.

Nonetheless, Kroll carries on with a business-as-usual posture. “The truth is, I’ve never seen my gender as a handicap to my success. I’m not a victim regardless of how the data is skewed.”

And so we reach the curious intersection of ignorance and vainglory.

Kroll asserted that data about women at work or in the world is somehow skewed. She also declared that she is not a victim of gender bias.

While Kroll might not see herself as a victim, one must wonder how she would feel should her boss be hauled away in handcuffs.

According to myriad accounts, Price is remarkably skilled at molding victims who do not realize the extent of their victimization until significant damage has already been done.

Price pulls the puppet strings. But Kroll runs the day-to-day. Abusers, especially the likes of a Weinstein or an Epstein or a Lauer et al. always position someone as a buffer to their incendiary acts. In politics, they call such a person a “useful idiot.”

And while labeling Kroll in such a way would certainly be derogatory if not brutish, Price allegedly does so to one female victim after another. “He used his dog Samantha as a comparison to me needing to be on a short leash,” said one woman.

Perhaps Kroll does not feel as if she were tethered to a short leash. But as company chief, Price has made sure she has obligations to 200 employees whose jobs, whose incomes, whose mortgages, whose partners, whose children, whose references and whose reputations rest in her hands.

Should the ship sink, Kroll will be the one on the top deck looking down at her passengers sliding into the brink as they ask why she did not warn them of the impending torment let alone help them escape before the bow careened into the iceberg.

For now, Price can continue to wake surf off the back of his yacht. Kroll can continue to spin as many plates as she can control. And Gravity employees can continue to collect paychecks from a man accused of multiple felonies, all of which were suffered by the same gender — her gender — for which Kroll said the data is skewed.

Perhaps pleading ignorance is blissful for some. But suffering its very real consequences often isn’t. Kroll said, [At Gravity] you are held accountable for what you say you are going to do.” Maybe the question she should ask herself is what if you don’t say or do anything at all until it’s too late.

Should you wish Price to publicly answer these allegations, share #MakeDanPriceAnswer on your social platforms.

If you or others you know have additional information about Price, contact us

GRAVITY PAYMENTS SECOND IN COMMAND Tammi Kroll REFUSES TO ADDRESS DAN PRICE ABUSE ALLEGATIONS

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A partial list of the news outlets with whom I either spoke or exchanged emails as far back as six years ago, all of whom declined to pick up my reporting, except one nod from Geekwire.