[Photo:  Steven A. Cohen at his Point72 office / Fortune.com Screen Grab]

by Howard Haykin

Steven A. Cohen has completed his 2-year suspension on managing other people’s money - a sanction he accepted to settle SEC and CFTC charges that he failed to supervise a former portfolio manager who engaged in insider trading while employed at his firm, SAC Capital.

Yet, before Cohen and his family office, Point72 Asset Management, can begin reaching out to the public, they’ll have to tackle a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by plaintiff Lauren Bonner, an Associate Director at Point 72. Ms. Bonner, who was been employed by the asset management firm since August 2016, claims that Cohen’s firm is a ‘cesspool of misogyny where the few women who manage to get hired are routinely degraded and excluded by their sexist pig bosses’.

As summarized by Bess Levin in her Vanity Fair column, Bonner’s lawsuit alleges, among other things, that:

• For a number of weeks last year, a whiteboard belonging to a high-level Point72 executive had the word “pussy” written on it, “leaving the firm’s few senior women feeling uneasy, according to the lawsuit.”

• Male colleagues routinely “[made] comments on women’s physical appearances.”

• Women were regularly “denied promotions and regularly forced out after male executives accuse them of being ‘too emotional,’ ‘too sensitive,’ or simply, ‘women.’”

• After filing a complaint against a high-ranking male executive, said executive was still allowed to sit in on the promotion committee to decide if she would be named a director.

• Another high-level executive called female employees “sweethearts” and “girls” and held “no girls allowed” meetings.

• A recent hire who was “unequivocally less experienced and less qualified” than Bonner was brought on at a higher level and more than double the base salary.

• At a fundraiser last year, a company consultant asked another guy, regarding a woman to whom he’d been introduced, “Do you want to f*ck her? You can. She works for me.”

For further details on the case/story, click on …

Steve Cohen’s Comeback Hits a Snag, Vanity Fair Hive

Bonner v. Point72 Asset Management, Steven A. Cohen, and Douglas Haynes, U.S. District Court Complaint

Steve Cohen’s Hedge Fund a Cesspool Of Misogyny, NYPost