Bryan Johnson's Misrepresentations About Taryn Southern
Lawmakers really need to clamp down on restrictive covenants.
The New York Times published a piece today about the way that Bryan Johnson uses confidentiality agreements to prevent workers from speaking out about his employment and other practices. The top of the article was focused on the efficacy of certain health products Johnson sells and the accuracy of claims he has made about his own health:
Of the roughly 1,700 participants in the study, about 60 percent experienced at least one side effect, according to internal emails, spreadsheets and other documents. Blood tests revealed that participants saw their testosterone levels drop and became prediabetic after following Mr. Johnson’s diet plan. It’s unclear how severe the side effects were.
…
In the Netflix documentary, which was largely filmed in 2023, Mr. Johnson said his biological age had reversed 5.1 years. But the results of a range of internal studies of his health between January 2022 and February 2024 showed it had increased by as much as 10 years, according to charts of the blood test results. It’s unclear what his current tests show.
The bottom of the article goes into the application of these confidentiality agreements against his other employees, one of whom was Taryn Southern.
Johnson released this response video to the article. Rather than respond to the claims about the efficacy of the health regimen he sells to the world or defend his use of extremely broad confidentiality agreements, Johnson narrowed in on a single participant in the story, his former employee Taryn Southern.
Johnson starts and ends the video by making reference to a lawsuit Southern filed against Johnson in October of 2021 (see this Vanity Fair piece for a summary of the allegations in the lawsuit). When talking about the lawsuit, he says:
I knew the allegations were false and I would not cave to this dark and twisted practice. She then came after me legally and lost twice. The court ordered her to pay me $500,000, but sadly that did not stop the media or the internet from continually calling me a monster.
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She has made many claims that simply do not align with the facts. This was proven in court twice. I have the evidence to defend my innocence. She’s sadly using her true story of cancer to manipulate the public. This is an injustice to real victims.
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Our reputation is our most precious asset. We work on it every second of every day. We show up on time. We say we’re sorry when we’re wrong. It’s honestly so inhumane for someone to try to destroy someone’s reputation with false allegations.
Johnson has been making versions of this particular presentation for many years now. In doing so, his goal is to make it seem like Southern’s claims against him were heard by the justice system and that the system determined that they had no merit. But this is absolutely not what happened.
The Johnson/Southern case generated a tremendous amount of legal documents, but the disposition of the case was ultimately fairly simple and turned on the interaction of three contractual clauses.
Arbitration Clause. As part of her employment under Johnson, Southern signed three employment agreements that contained arbitration clauses requiring that she bring claims against Johnson’s companies and him in arbitration.
Fee-Shifting Clause. Those same employment agreements also contained clauses stating that, if Southern initiates legal proceedings against Johnson and loses, then she must pay Johnson’s legal expenses.
Release-of-Claims Clause. Southern subsequently signed an employment separation agreement that contained a general release of claims against Johnson.
Southern filed a lawsuit against Johnson that was rooted in the claim that the two had entered into an oral agreement where Johnson promised to financially and medically take care of Southern for life. These kinds of agreements — made between nonmarital, cohabitating partners — are called Marvin agreements and they are enforceable under California law. What Southern was seeking was akin to alimony. Southern made other claims as well, including intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the Marvin agreement claim was the main one.
When filing the lawsuit, Southern and her lawyers did not believe that her employment and employment separation agreements were relevant because they believed that they were meant to apply to employment issues, e.g. things like wage-and-hour violations and anti-discrimination laws.
But the justice system did not see it the way they did. What ended up happening is:
Johnson used the Arbitration Clause to get the court to send Southern’s claims against him to arbitration. Arbitration is biased in favor of employers.
Without ever looking into the factual merits of the Marvin agreement claim, the arbitrator ruled that Southern had released her claim against Johnson in the Release-of-Claims Clause and dismissed the case.
Because Southern lost the case, Johnson was able to invoke the Fee Shifting Clause to get an order requiring Southern to pay his legal expenses.
None of these proceedings ever reached the question of whether Southern’s claims about the existence of a Marvin agreement or intentional infliction of emotional distress were true. The arbitrator merely decided that, even if the claims were true, Southern had waived her right to bring them in her employment separation agreement.
Similarly, Southern was not ordered to pay Johnson’s legal fees because it was determined that what she claimed he did to her never happened. Nor was she ordered to pay his fees because he won a counterclaim against her where he alleged that she had engaged in some kind of tortious conduct towards him. She was ordered to pay the fees because, in this web of contracts she signed over the years, there was a provision that stated that she had to pay his legal expenses if she ever lost a lawsuit against him.
In addition to misleading people about how this legal process played out, Johnson has lied about how he treated Southern after the process was over. As the New York Times story details, he claimed that he would put the money Southern was ordered to pay him into a trust for her medical expenses. These promises were presumably calculated to make Johnson seem like a good guy, but he did not follow through on them and they were completely nonsensical to begin with. After all, if Johnson wanted Southern to have this money for her medical expenses, he could have refrained from asking the court to award it to him or opted not to collect it after it was awarded. The idea of collecting it so that he could then give it right back through a medical trust he controlled is ridiculous, even if he had done it, which he did not.
It’s absurd for Johnson to end his video response by invoking the importance of reputation. In this and prior videos, Johnson has consistently undermined Southern’s reputation by falsely presenting his successful use of restrictive contracts to get her case against him dismissed as proof that the claims she made in her complaint were proven false. And he’s done this all while continuing to subject Southern to non-disparagement and confidentiality rules that make it legally difficult for her to respond.
This Is the Problem With These Employment Practices
Southern’s case is a good illustration of the problem with these and other kinds of clauses that have become almost standard practice in employment agreements, employee handbooks, and similar kinds of documents governing employee-employer relations. In addition to being subject to arbitration, fee-shifting, and release-of-claims rules, employees often end up gagged by things like non-disparagement, confidentiality, and non-disclosure rules. Employers also like to make it financially punishing for their workers to quit and do something else by imposing non-compete rules, coworker and customer non-solicitation rules, and stay-or-pay provisions that require their workers to give money to their employer if they quit.
On net, these employment practices create a labor system that looks more like feudalism than it does the capitalist “free labor” system. Workers subject to these rules end up afraid to leave their jobs or talk openly about their bosses while the government’s ability to step in and enforce labor protections is hugely diminished. This creates an essentially lawless situation with massive power imbalances that bad actors can and do exploit with impunity.
There is a notable exception to all of this. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employees have a right to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of … mutual aid or protection.” This right supersedes all of these contract rules. But most workers are unaware of this right and, even when they are informed about it, the mere existence of the contract rules tends to scare them away from exercising it. Non-disparagement, confidentiality, and non-disclosure rules are not enforceable against concerted activity done for the purpose of mutual aid or protection — which includes things like collectively publicizing working conditions in a newspaper as Southern and other former employees have just done — but this doesn’t stop employers from trying to enforce them and not very many people have the nerve or resources to defend themselves from an illegal lawsuit seeking to enforce these clauses against concerted activity.
Southern and her colleagues are very brave to step out on this limb in the way that they have. Already, one of Johnson’s lawyers has sent a letter threatening legal action against their protected activity. Sending these kinds of threats is itself illegal, but this sort of lawlessness is also basically standard practice at this point.
In addition to trying to warn other Johnson employees about how he treats his workers and trying to encourage Johnson to change his employment practices going forward, Southern and her colleagues have decided to publicize their working conditions as part of a broader effort to bring policymaker attention to these issues and enact legal reforms that will protect all workers from these sorts of employment practices and the bad bosses that rely upon them. I hope they are successful and that lawmakers see the value in creating a labor system where worker rights are not crushed under the weight of these malicious contracts, a system where workers can freely speak their minds, quit their jobs, and turn to the government when their bosses violate the law. Many people think that this is the system we already have, only to find out too late that it is not.