In an abrupt downfall for one of the few Black chief executives of a major U.S. company, Nigerian born Jide Zeitlin has resigned as the CEO and chairm
In an abrupt downfall for one of the few Black chief executives of a major U.S. company, Nigerian born Jide Zeitlin has resigned as the CEO and chairman of the luxury goods company, Tapestry after a board investigation into his personal behavior,
The parent company of Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman announced on Teusday morning that Zeitlin was stepping down from the company and the board, effective immediately, for “personal reasons.”
However, sources told the Wall Street Journal that the company hired a law firm this month to investigate misconduct allegations by a woman who accused Zeitlin of “posing as a photographer under an alias to lure her into a romantic relationship more than a decade ago.”
Zeitlin said he did not use power, wealth, or position to further that relationship, which he said began and ended 13 years ago, and that he sometimes used the pseudonym James when he photographed strangers “for privacy reasons when I was rising through the ranks as a rare Black banker.”
He said that the allegations reached the board of directors after a journalist named William Cohan sent pointed questions about the relationship, which led to a series of events that Zeitlin claimed his advisors called a highly unusual hit job.
Zeitlin joined Tapestry’s board in 2006, had been chairman since November 2014 and ascended to CEO last September; he previously spent two decades at Goldman Sachs and served in senior management positions.
In 2009, Zeitlin was nominated to serve as an envoy to the United Nations for financial overhaul and was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but withdrew citing “personal reasons.”
But according to Foreign Policy reporting at the time, a woman contacted several government offices and multiple news outlets to say that he “used deception to lure her” into a romantic relationship — apparently the same relationship behind his exit from Tapestry.
“I am the first person to acknowledge that I am human, for better and worse. I made a mistake in having a relationship with this woman and I dealt with that in my personal life at the time. But, more than a decade after my U.N. nomination process, I cannot allow these allegations to be weaponized against me,” Zeitlin said in his LinkedIn post.
In 2007, American Tower Corp. filed a lawsuit accusing him of impersonating its CEO in an email when he was running a rival wireless tower operator. He later said it was a joke that clearly fell flat.
Jide Zeitlin who was born in Nigeria was adopted by an American family when he was 5. He graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1985 and received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1987.
