My boss (42M) is an insane asshole who’s weirdly obsessed with me (27F)
For context, I am a high-performing employee who was moved by my company to work in Germany. I am educated, a hard worker, and speak multiple languages. I also really try hard to be a team player and get along with everyone, and I am generally well-liked/well-regarded within my company. My boss is German, and my colleagues are from all over Europe. I am the only American.
I am contractually obligated to stay until June 1st, 2025
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the insanity. Here are the following things my boss has said/done to me:
He has made fun of me multiple times for being American and has said that “we’re all the same”. He interrupted a professional presentation I was making to a group to make fun of a specific design I used on a slide that other American colleagues had used before and loudly laughed then commented, ”We were just discussing how much we hate X design, and all the Americans use it. Thanks for showing us once again you’re just an American.”
He has made jokes about me in group settings loudly insinuating that I sleep around in exchange for money/gifts. He even made comments like, “She has a lot of friends with big hearts and big wallets.” When I got up to leave once, a colleague told me he continued to laugh and say, “I bet she’s meeting up with a man right now.” When confronted, he pretended I didn’t know what I was talking about and said he never made those jokes.
He told me, ”Are you going to go home and cry to your mom about the fact that nobody likes you?” When I told him I think it’s just his opinion, he responded, ”It’s everyone’s opinion. Nobody likes you.”
He talks poorly about me behind my back to his two other male direct reports and has successfully turned them against me. This has created a “me vs them” boys’ club dynamic. It is easy for him to do so since he frequently travels with them, and they get much more exposure to him than they do to me (they live in different countries).
The one direct report who also lives in Germany that he has he consistently tries to keep her away from me to be able to control her perception of me.
He has excluded me from meetings that involved the rest of his team, and he consistently excludes me from business travels all of his other direct reports engage in.
He takes his other direct reports to strip clubs, but he once got mad at me for bringing a baguette to a bar and accidentally forgetting it and saying it was “unprofessional” (I fucking wish I was exaggerating). Yes, he yelled at me in front of my coworkers over //bread//. Full story in comments
He has no problem trying to prolong eye contact and look me up and down when I’m not looking. I did once see him staring at my tits and smirking, but I didn’t say anything.
He refuses to give me feedback and gave me my annual performance review 5 months late (after I practically begged him for it because I wanted to see how I could improve). The first 30 seconds of the performance review were actually about my work (all good things). The next hour and a half was just him criticizing my personality. He said that I talked too much during meetings, but then he said a few minutes later that I was too quiet, and then he criticized me for appearing anxious in one meeting because I was fidgeting. He also said I was too loud, but that I was also not engaging enough with the team.
When I went to go order in a bakery in German, he immediately started snickering and making fun of my German alongside one of his male direct reports.
He didn’t give me feedback or specific expectations on a project for months, and then he waited for his boss to be present to start yelling at me over something he felt I did wrong on the project that wasn’t previously communicated. He was yelling at me to the point to where his boss (who has a high opinion of me) had to step in and mediate. He then asked me if I had done X, Y, and Z for the project (an expectation he never communicated). When I said no, he blew me off and said I clearly wasn’t equipped to handle it. This was a project I had inherited from someone previously, so I reached out to this person and asked them if they were ever told these specific expectations, and they were confused and had no idea what I was talking about. In other words, he tried to make me look incompetent in front of his boss for no reason by pulling imaginary expectations out of nowhere then yelling at me for not meeting them.
I had a career coach that the company hired to mentor me both in my career and mental health, but after a disagreement my boss and I had, he called the coach and told him that I wouldn’t be able to attend anymore due to “budget cuts”. My boss didn’t communicate this with me, so my coach had to very awkwardly tell me during the session that it was our last one.
In group settings he used to make fun of me incessantly. He would mock my nationality, my voice, my accent, my mannerisms, etc. When I set a very strong boundary and told him to stop, he then began to portray me as difficult to work with.
Although he’s normal when we’re alone and is on the respectful/professional side, whenever he is around his male direct reports he acts extremely disrespectful towards me, and he goes out of his way to provide negative feedback and criticize my work.
He literally has a long-term girlfriend who has a life-threatening illness, yet he’s constantly searching for female attention/validation from his employees, loudly checks out groups of teenagers (like 17/18/19), makes way too many jokes about prostitutes and visiting prostitutes, and clearly is trying to flirt his way into the pants of one his female direct reports (the one he tries to keep away from me that I mentioned in #5).
There’s more, but these are the main ones. I would like advice on how to manage him even though I think I’ve begun to somewhat get the hang of it. Yes, I will clarify any of the points if any of you ask me to. No, I am not exaggerating nor is my goal to victimize myself. I just can’t complain about this to my coworkers, but I wanted to vent because I really cannot believe bosses like this exist.
Hope whoever is reading this has a nice day, and hats off if you had the attention span to read it all.