WME Irked Over E-mail

An internal William Morris Endeavor e-mail that recently found its way to Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood blog reportedly caused the ax to swing at the company’s New York and Los Angeles offices.

The story goes that Marcus Washington, a floater working in WME’s New York office, sent a goodbye e-mail to the entire agency after being fired, which was subsequently forwarded by numerous staffers to e-mail addresses outside the company.

Washington’s e-mail was mostly civil, and he gave props to music agent Cara Lewis but, near the end, he gave a “thank you” to human resources.

“I can’t forget a special thanks to Chris Walsh, our extremely qualified and hard working ‘human resources’ duo, JZH and others that tried to ruin my progress by being conniving, hateful and deceiving. Just know that it’s all going to come back to you….and you could never steal my joy or my dignity.”

He wrapped with the following: “STOP THE MICROMANAGING AND GROUPTHINK…it’s leading to be the deterioration of this company.”

Finke wrote, “At Ari Emanuel’s insistence, WME conducted a witch-hunt to determine who had sent that Marcus Washington goodbye e-mail to addresses outside the company. … My insiders say 75 staffers were ID’ed.”

Pinpointed individuals in both the NYC and Los Angeles offices were allegedly reprimanded for violating company policy and the “trust” of the organization. Several who forwarded the e-mail to industry types were axed, Finke said.

The blogger added that not one of the fired or ID’ed staffers was responsible for the leak to Deadline Hollywood.