tl;dr meeting with HR coming up to lay out my formal complaint about a bully CXX who defamed me over email with colleagues on cc. Getting it off my chest and looking for opinions
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In a conservative corporate environment but with a small HR team of 1 and a thin employee handbook with no progressive discipline. I (male) am fairly high tier but 2 tiers below the CXX (female) and an individual contributor for now. I have rapport and regularly meet with the C- execs including CEO.
Without divulging all details, there was an email exchange where I was asked by CXX to make an update to a tool she uses – something i had put together 6 months back and which is well outside my job function but within my capability so I helped out to get the thing done quickly. I updated it, she misunderstood some details which were not new and replied with colleagues on the chain with the line “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, I need… [something already provided for in my tool]”.
I took offense at being spoken to this way and I replied starting with “I can answer that: 3 fewer times than you’ve told me already” before explaining the details of the tool to correct the misunderstanding. After the correction I ended with a line about not ever talking to me in this hostile manner again.
So far there was a bit of attitude and sarcasm on either side, nothing over the top for this place. She then replied, again with colleagues (including superiors and now adding her boss and HR) on the chain, that i must be a racist (against a certain white European nationality) and a sexist and that I’m mean to everyone but extra horrible to her and she has never in her career worked with someone like me. I must think I’m better than her and something to the effect of “oh wow I’m a big bad man” (gender based harassment). She is sad to see the company has changed so much in the past years ( she’s setting up a hierarchy between tenured employees and a large new cohort). Also that she is proud of what she’s accomplished and won’t be run all over by someone as low as me.
I am now mortified at the prospect of attending meetings. And I’m in fear for my job candidly because while her diatribe was way over the top with multiple violations of the employee CoC and the equal opportunity statement in the handbook, my own email can be stretch as being threatening (“don’t ever talk to me this way again…”). She outranks me as an officer of the company – hr will protect management in most circumstances. This would be a slam dunk otherwise.
I had already emailed HR the next day to say I’d be lodging a formal complaint. Any advice for this meet? I expect it will be Hr + Legal on the other side