Molson Coors Legal Chief Takes Aggressive Approach Post #MeToo

Top executives at beer giant Molson Coors Beverage Co. weren’t fully on board—at least initially— with the need to investigate all employee sexual harassment complaints thoroughly, said the company’s chief legal officer.

“I’ve become much more liberal about considering” ethics investigations in response to sexual harassment accusations and “taking action on the harasser,” said Anne-Marie D’Angelo, Molson Coors chief legal and government affairs officer.

D’Angelo, speaking on a panel at a American Bar Association conference Thursday in Miami, said that she initially, “quite candidly, met a little bit of resistance with the executive team. Like, ‘we don’t want to just continue to investigate these things.’”

D’Angelo, who arrived at the company in November 2021, said she made the suggestion in anticipation “that down the road that there could be a potential view that everyone in the beer business knows that if you work at Molson Coors you get sexually harassed.”

In the aftermath of #MeToo, there’s a particular need to “guard against this view that we don’t take these things seriously,” D’Angelo said.

Conducting full investigations is especially necessary if the accusations are leveled against a senior member of the company and when “there’s been even an inkling of, ‘I didn’t come forward in the past because I was afraid,’” D’Angelo said during a panel at the ABA white-collar crime conference.