In early August 2025, Julia Ryan, the then-director of growth for The San Francisco Standard, says she received an email from her boss, Standard CEO Griffin Gaffney, blaming her for the poor performance of two teams she did not lead. According to Ryan, when she and Gaffney met the following week, she pointed out that those teams were led by men. Two days later, Ryan says, Gaffney fired her.
Last week, attorneys representing Ryan filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco against the Standard’s parent company, Here/Say LLC, and Gaffney for gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliatory practices. The lawsuit, filed last Wednesday, also claims Ryan’s case “suggests there is a pattern” at the Standard of promoting men and discriminating against women, as well as an alleged pattern of retaliating against the women who complain about this behavior.
In a video call with Gazetteer SF, Ryan and her lawyers, Emily McGrath of Lawless, Lawless & McGrath and Julia Stephanides of Stephanides Law, declined to share a dollar amount Ryan would be willing to settle for or a reason why Ryan waited a year to sue her former employer. Ryan did share that she had “worked in quite a few newsrooms, and I’ve just never seen an environment that was so inappropriate and unprofessional and sexist.”
Ryan, now 35, joined the Standard in June 2024. As its director of growth, she was responsible for marketing the publication’s subscription program and growing its readership. According to the suit, she oversaw several teams, including social media, events, and email and brand marketing. In October that year, she began reporting to Gaffney directly.
Ryan, who has previously worked in similar roles at media companies including TIME, Air Mail, and the New York Post, excelled in her work at the Standard “despite the hostile environment created by Mr. Gaffney,” the lawsuit claims. Gaffney allegedly made “belittling and highly critical remarks about women, both verbally and in writing.”
For example, the lawsuit notes that Gaffney made sexually explicit comments in written correspondence with Ryan, including two instances in late 2024 in which he suggested he “have an affair with the significant other of one of The Standard’s prominent business partners.” The filing also claims that, around that same time, he told Ryan over Slack that it takes a “hot ass” to close a deal and that she and others should have gym memberships for this reason.
“It was really clear to me early on in my tenure at the Standard that he evaluated women based on their appearances,” Ryan told Gazetteer. To avoid undue scrutiny from Gaffney, Ryan said she began putting “careful consideration into how I dressed or looked,” paying extra attention to her hair, makeup, and outfit, if she knew she was going to see her boss in the office or at a work event.
(Gaffney is married to a man; the suit does not claim any sexual or romantic overtones. Stephanides, one of Ryan’s lawyers, said that while it’s hard to speculate Gaffney’s motivations for his behavior, “[Ryan’s] sense is that he didn’t really like and respect women to the same extent that he did men.”)
The lawsuit claims Gaffney derided “a prominent female leader in tech,” telling Ryan over Slack she was only “famous because of her brother.”
The lawsuit also says that while texting Ryan from a work event in early 2025, Gaffney allegedly wrote that a woman he’d met there had “crazy eyes” and speculated that she was on Ozempic. Ryan said this was one of the comments she remembers thinking crossed a line.
“It became a pattern of behavior I had just never seen before,” Ryan said of Gaffney’s sexist remarks. “I’d never seen somebody so consistently and openly disrespectful towards women in a workplace.”
The lawsuit claims that the Standard “lacked a proper Human Resources function for reporting such complaints” and that the functional head of HR was one of Gaffney’s direct reports and was “very close” with the CEO.
“It was exhausting and distressing” to feel there was not a safe way to file a formal complaint, Ryan said. “This is the CEO, this isn’t just a colleague. This is the person who really sets the tone for the company.”
“Julia did have significant emotional distress that manifested physically and emotionally and mentally,” Stephanides claimed. She declined to list specific physical symptoms but said they “will come out as this progresses. It’s definitely something we’re claiming.”
Despite this, Ryan says she performed well at her job. The lawsuit claims Standard’s online followers had doubled in the year since Ryan began leading social media efforts. It also says she received glowing reviews from Gaffney, one of which is included in the filing.
The lawsuit suggests things went south after Ryan talked with other female employees in leadership positions about the double standard Gaffney set for women at the company, as well as a handful of meetings in which Ryan opposed hiring — or, in one instance, not firing — men who had “acted inappropriately” toward their female colleagues.
Those meetings led up to the August 1 email, when the lawsuit claims Gaffney “assigned blame to Ms. Ryan for issues that were outside of her control,” specifically the poor performance of the editorial and data analytics teams. According to the filing, when Ryan told Gaffney the next day she felt the situation had sexist undertones, “Gaffney immediately became enraged… He raised his voice, and his tone became markedly more aggressive.”
Gaffney did not respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment in time for publication.
Chelsea Kohler, a spokesperson for the Standard, emphasized to Gazetteer on behalf of the company that Ryan did not meet professional expectations.
“That membership growth fell well short of the Company’s ambitions is not in dispute. Ms. Ryan acknowledged the shortfall at the time, and her complaint does not dispute it now,” Kohler said in a statement. “What she disputes is why her employment ended, and on that the allegations do not reflect the facts. Gender played no role in the decision. We will address these claims through the legal process, not in the press.”
Over email, Gaffney recommended we reach out to a former Standard employee who worked with Ryan, who asked to remain anonymous for fear that being publicly involved in the lawsuit would damage their professional reputation. This person said Ryan herself “created a lot of that hostile environment” detailed in Ryan’s lawsuit. “She is not the girl’s girl that she claims to be,” this person said. “She was condescending and brought on a lot of that microaggression energy… She was a nightmare to work with.”
When asked about this characterization, Ryan responded, “I wouldn’t be the first woman to be attacked for speaking out, but I am very saddened that vague negative comments are now being made about me.”
A current Standard employee who was not authorized to speak on the lawsuit agreed that, even amid what this person called a clear systemic bias against women advanced by Gaffney, Ryan’s performance may have been a legitimate factor in her termination. This person said a job like Ryan’s requires strong local relationships, but Ryan worked remotely from Rhode Island for most of her tenure. (Ryan’s attorney Stephanides told Gazetteer that Ryan “did work remotely from Rhode Island but traveled frequently to San Francisco for work events and to be in the office. She was never informed that this had any impact on her performance.”)
“I find her claims to excellence non-credible, but I also find her claims to gender-based discrimination very credible,” the employee said.
Gaffney co-founded the Standard with funding from billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz in 2021. The local publication employs about 70 people, including reporters, editors, photographers, software engineers, data analysts, and social media producers. (Full disclosure: the editor of Gazetteer worked as a contractor on a 10-week project at the Standard in 2025 but did not meet Ryan and had limited interaction with Gaffney, who was on medical leave for most of that time.) The outlet has hundreds of thousands of followers across social media platforms and its editorial content reaches more than a million monthly readers, according to the Standard’s website.
Ryan said she has vested equity in the company but declined to share details regarding its worth.
Moritz did not respond to Gazetteer’s multiple requests for comment.
