The Whistleblower Who Isn’t

On Friday, September 17, Sherron Watkins will visit Heidelberg University, of Tiffin, Ohio. She is reportedly relaying to the “Heidelberg community” her “personal experiences she had with Enron as the whistleblower.”

Once again, Sherron Watkins is arbitraging a story that is not only untrue, it is dangerous and irresponsible. She was not a whistleblower. Whistleblowers ruin their careers; whistleblowers risk something by speaking out against something wrong or illegal. What Sherron Watkins did was the antithesis of that.

One thing that always bothered me was a question that was asked numerous times at the Skilling/Lay trial. For quite a while, Cliff Stricklin questioned Dr. Lay over and over about the day he met with Sherron Watkins after she sent that memo. Over and over again, both Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling agreed that Dr. Lay had NOT mentioned his meeting scheduled with Sherron Watkins only three hours after the meeting with Skilling.

Jeff, who had left the company by this point, said they discussed some ideas he had. Lay agreed. Neither of their stories ever changed. Cliff Stricklin and the DOJ apparently believed that Lay and Skilling had a strategy session about how to deal with Watkins, but the facts didn’t support that.

So I began to think about that meeting. And I studied the memo, I began to see it in a different light. It seemed an aggressive note to me, and vaguely odd without any identification on it. She said there was the appearance of accounting improprieties, and she wanted a piece of it. It seemed like blackmail.

Others I spoke to read it the same way. People she worked with, and people who worked in other divisions, and people who knew her personally all agreed with the central thrust that she was basically telling Ken Lay that if he knew what was good for him, he’d start treating her a little bitter, or else he’d have a PR problem on his hands the likes of which he had never seen before.

Sherron Watkins made an appointment with Ken Lay. Ken Lay probably had no idea what to think. Here was an employee who was making thinly veiled threats and she wanted an audience with him. I think we step outside what we know about Ken Lay as a boss, we can say with 100% certainty that he was a good man, a very strong man, and he had certain ideas about the roles of men in society. Basically, if he was being blackmailed, the gentlemanly thing to do is hear her out, and not whine about it like a little bitch to Jeff Skilling. After all, Jeff no longer worked there. And it probably wasn’t an entirely business situation; there had to be a personal element to this. Sherron was threatening him as well his company.

I have no doubt that Ken Lay never mentioned Sherron Watkins to Jeff during that meeting. After the meeting with Sherron, Ken Lay called the attorneys. He probably did want to find out if there was any truth to her allegations. When the attorneys completed their investigation, not much happened. Sherron had been moved to Cindy Olson’s group, and she’d gone on vacation to Mexico.

When she returned, she didn’t pursue it. She just quietly shut up. A strange reaction for someone who was concerned that the company would implode in a wave of accounting scandals. She didn’t call the WSJ. She didn’t call the Attorney General or the FBI. She just… shut up.

In fact, she was quiet until after the company collapsed. Only after an investigation had been launched to find the author of the memo did she finally come forward. Then several things happened. The first is the liberal media immediately liked her because she lent credibility to the theory they were already working under, which is that Enron was corrupt. Prosecutors liked her for that reason as well. And suddenly it was easy to say that she was a whistleblower instead of what she really was – a manipulative mid-level employee who believed that it was unfair that everyone else was getting rich and she wasn’t.

Despite the fact that she admitted under oath that she committed the felony of insider trading, she launched a business to teach people who to be ethical. It’s been nine years since Enron collapsed and she is still milking that title.

She isn’t a hero. She isn’t a whistleblower. She is a liar and a criminal. However, I will give her credit for one thing: her timing with that memo was positively Teutonic.

As she goes from lecture hall to lecture hall, spreading the lies about her involvement in Enron, I feel only old anger at her – the anger most executives can’t even muster. I am angry because while many of the executives went to prison and have suffered financially and have seen their careers crumble, she was never punished for the illegal and unethical things she did.

She is religious now, and active in a church where a friend who attends the same church says that she is very devout. I hope for her sake it is sincere. But the fact that she is continuing to lie and lecture tells me it isn’t. Like everything else about Sherron Watkins, I think she does it for appearances, not because it’s actually true or actually in her heart.