Tangled Webs of Deception

Below please find Toray vs. Paknis timeline update XIV, dated 9-8-24, explaining why Toray Plastics America (TPA) and Toray International America (TIA) sued me in December 2018 and threatened my publisher with a lawsuit in June of 2019.

In their suit, TPA lied and claimed a common reader could identify TPA in my book.  

By suing me, TPA brought their concerns public and outed themselves, accomplishing the TPA  notoriety they claimed I caused with my book. 

Bringing their suit to the public domain, combined with changes in state and federal non-disclosure laws, allows me to discuss the case and show how TPA used the Federal Justice System to bully me. 

Toray also threatened my publisher who then signed over the rights of the book to me and stopped publishing, printing, distributing, marketing, and selling my book, Successful Leaders Aren't Bullies, released September, 2018.

Their suit also scared away publishers.  The book is legal and tight.  It was reviewed by four (4) separate editorial teams to make it sue proof. 

Thanks to the US Presidential election and an avalanche workplace abuse, timing and demand is ripe to rerelease this book, seventy one (71) months after Simon & Schuster first released it. 

March 2023:  Fifty one (51) months after filing and after an unusual number of judicial delays, Toray dismissed my case, with prejudice, and paid my legal fees, basically acknowledging their lawsuit was frivolous. I signed nothing.  

However, Toray's interfering with, and threatening, my publisher in June 2019, iced the book's momentum, as Toray intended. 

Toray's frivolous case was driven by one embittered executive who attacked me with the Federal Justice System, violated my rights to free speech and to a fair trial. Toray also interfered with my business contracts. Even Judge William E. Smith questioned Toray's motives and extreme vindictiveness.  

Below please find an updated version with the recent editions at the end, dated Summer 2018. 

2005:  Another one of my client's employees was hired by TPA and introduced TPA to me and my management development services.

2005 - 2016: TPA and TIA contracted with me each year to deliver, at TIA sites around the country, an annual three day long management development program.

October 2016:  TPA hired me full time to expand my management development services and to work as a generalist in one of their plants. 

Within a week of TPA hiring me full time, a respective plant employee stated, due to abusive management practices, they felt threatened an angry coworker would commit a workplace shooting.  

After elevating this shooting concern, I was told to ignore it.  When I stated this response made me uncomfortable, I was asked to conduct an internal investigation. 

May 2017:  My completed internal TPA shooting threat investigation, including input from TPA frontline workers and management staff, showed the problematic plant workers rated and perceived its management's behavior much worse than behaviors at its sister plants. 

The report and its findings were shared with senior executives who took no action. 

June 2017:  A person reporting to my plant's bullying manager was terminated.  

After this termination, another employee visited my office claiming executives believed the wronged and terminated worker posed a shooting threat in returning to TPA with a gun. 

These same executives were sitting on my report, stating the same bullying manager's behaviors could also instigate a frontline worker shooting.

The threatening circumstances warranted my sharing these concerns, and my report, with then Toray Plastics America's president. They gave me "thirty (30) days on the beach," and warned me not to share the report with Toray's Japanese Expats.   

July 2017: In those thirty days, I finished compiling a manuscript I started writing as a child, describing how good coaches, teams, and teachers helped me overcome seven (7) of ten (10) adverse childhood experiences (ACES).  

It shared the factors people and organizations use to transcend trauma and abuse. 

Nowhere in the manuscript is Toray mentioned or referenced.  It had NOTHING to do with Toray, as their narcissistic executive claimed.

Within ten days of submitting my manuscript to friends, I signed a generous publishing agreement with a known publisher whose distributor is Simon & Schuster. The publisher asked if I could write a book entitled, "Successful Leaders Aren't Bullies."

It is not political. It describes cases where I helped organizations identify, address, prevent, and transcend workplace bullying. Then President Donald Trump's displaying bullying behaviors influenced their title recommendation.  

July 2017:  When I returned to work, I was isolated in a segregated office at corporate headquarters.  I wasn't allowed to return to my office in the plant because they claimed I was afraid of being shot.  This was another form of retaliation for my elevating reputable shooting threats.  

A door, exiting the building and used by the then president to sneak away from work unseen, was in my isolation tank.  On my first day in isolation, my presence shocked the president during an attempted secret early escape.  

Other than this unintended interruption, I received no emails or calls or visitors over the next two to three weeks and then was given gradual increased responsibility.  After a month I was permitted to return to my office in the problematic plant. 

August 2017: Workers visited my plant office and welcomed me back. Many thanked me for making efforts to make their workplace non threatening and safe.  

One worker asked for a private meeting. He stated he knew I was trying to help him and his peers.  Near tears, he thanked me and offered his support "to do anything and everything possible" to stop the abuse.  

Several weeks after TPA terminated me for sharing the shooting report with a Toray Japanese Expat who requested it, this worker was found dead, due to his own actions, in his apartment.  

September 2017:  A Japanese Expat Toray Employee asked me for a private meeting.  He stated TPA's American Management team was lying to him and his Japanese Toray peers.  He stated the plant where we worked was the worst, or one of the worst, performing plants in Toray's portfolio of over two hundred and fifty (250) plants. 

This plant had the highest turnover, FMLA claims, damaged equipment, absenteeism, and violence at Toray Industries.  He said the American Management team stated the reason was low quality RI employee pools.  However, he knew the plant abutting the problematic plant had some of the best performance and cost containment.  It hired from the same worker pools.  

The many Toray Japanese Expats at this bullied plant witnessed this plant's abusive management practices, yet did nothing to interfere with, or to stop, it.  This contradicted the Japanese management ethos and practices at their Japanese plants, where front line workers are worshipped.  

I felt I was probably being tested by this Japanese Expat, to see if I would break the "Omerta" or code of silence protecting the US management's vile and abusive behaviors from being outed.  

He told me I wouldn't lose my job if I shared the report with him.  I disagreed.  I told him I had been warned by TPA's president to not share the report with Toray's Expat Japanese workers. 

I told him I had completed an investigation identifying the exact cause of all the plant's problems. He was probably aware of my investigation, but none of Toray's American Management team would share the report with him.  

TPA's American Management's lies and collusion and concealing abusive and illegal behaviors drove me to share the report with this Japanese Expat, hoping he would address and stop the abuse   

If it was a good company, as it seemed to be in Japan, Japanese Management would demand change.  If not, I'd be gone asap.

How long after handing Toray's Japanese Expat employee my shooting threat report did it take Toray's American team to terminate me?

September 2017:  It took less than twenty four hours for the Toray Japanese Expat to share the contents of the report with Japanese Executives and for word of this review to reach TPA's American Management Team who assembled for 8:00 am the next morning to harass and terminate me.  

During this meeting I taped, as RI is a one party consent state, I said I was being terminated for sharing the workplace shooting threat investigation and report with a Toray Japanese Expat.  I said I shared the report hoping it would stop the bullying and abusive management behaviors they all knew about. 

They ignored all of the bullying complaints and reports and were doing nothing to protect their workforce. They created a hostile and threatening work environment.  They terminated those who spoke out to protect Toray workers from TPA's bullying abuse .  

June 2018:  TPA terminated me in September 2017 in retaliation for sharing my TPA shooting threat investigation with a Japanese Toray Expat who requested it.  

The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) of 1970, Section 11(c), prohibits employers from retaliating against employees for exercising their rights under the act, such as filing a complaint with OSHA or raising a health and safety concern with their employer. 

Due to my illegal termination, Toray, in June 2018, agreed to settle my wrongful termination and compensated me.

Thus, the severance and NDA I entered into with TPA in June 2018, now null and void thanks to recent federal and state nondisclosure agreement law changes, was TPA's attempt to keep my termination, and the safety threatening reasons for my termination, hidden.  

In this meeting, to protect myself, I disclosed I was writing a book about workplace bullying. I was forthright about my book to prevent TPA from having the grounds to sue me.  

A common reader cannot identify or recognize Toray in my book.  

My NDA with Toray did allow me to source material from my Toray consulting and work experiences.  Just to safeguard against a lawsuit, I blended, with four different editorial teams, these experiences with those of my other clients.

In suing me, Toray either showed they  identified with the predatory and abusive workplace behaviors outlined in the book or they identified themselves in the book. 

If so, they should be ashamed and embarrassed, not retaliatory.  Or, they sued me because they were jealous and did not want, or allow, my book to succeed. Regardless, I did not violate the law or my NDA, yet my rights were violated by TPA and their vindictive executives.

Summer 2018:  When these appalling behaviors were being committed against front line Toray Plastic America workers, Toray Plastics America was receiving more RI workforce improvement grant monies than any other RI organization.

Rhode Island Government Workers who helped administer workforce improvement grants at this time stated then Governor, and current Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo green lighted all respective and related workforce improvement monies to Toray Plastics America of North Kingstown, RI. Raimondo stated Toray gets whatever funds it wants, no questions asked. 

There was no oversight.  A Toray employee who reported directly to a Toray executive called RI's Workforce Improvement Grant division almost daily, asking for more money.  RI Workforce Improvement Grant Administrators always, as instructed, approved Toray’s requests for more funding.  

The RI State Workers who assessed these grant applications and their respective RI companies were concerned with Toray's workforce improvement grant approvals.  

They felt they might become liable and charged with misallocating government funds if Toray, as was in fact the case, was violating workplace safety and conduct application requirements.  

There was little workforce improvement training, or at least nowhere near the amount of training justifying the significant funds being dumped into Toray Plastics America by RI's Workforce Improvement Grant Administration.  

It was shocking to see Toray Plastics America receiving this tremendous amount of workforce improvement funding while knowing one of its key managers was assaulting and abusing its front-line workforce.

It was also tragic and wrong for a company headquartered in Japan, given the torturous atrocities American Soldiers suffered by Japanese Military during World War II, to allow managers to torture current American workers at Toray’s American Plants. 

Next: What did the Providence Journal do with this report and why did Toray sue me?