This is the second in a two-part series regarding allegations of a toxic work culture and other systemic problems at Curaleaf Holdings. It originally appeared in Green Market Report.
Many employees who part ways with Midtown-based Curaleaf Holdings wind up taking severance packages, which typically include nondisparagement agreements that require them to remain silent about their experiences at the MSO, according to several former company executives. That’s made it rare for tales like those of Khadijah Tribble, Kathryn Rincon and Kelly Sarratt — all of whom have alleged in separate lawsuits that the company has a hostile sexist corporate culture — to seep into the cannabis industry discourse.
But at least a handful have refused to take the payout, so that they could keep their ability to sue and speak about the various abuses they experienced while employed at Curaleaf.
That cohort includes Kimber Arezzi, former director of sales for Curaleaf’s operations in New York state, who said she now wants it widely advertised how “toxic” the company truly is. Two other former Curaleaf higher-level employees also spoke with Green Market Report on condition of anonymity in order to avoid blowback from the company, revealing similar stories of misogyny, racism, nepotism and other issues with the MSO.
“It was the most toxic work environment I have ever been in,” Arezzi said. “There’s no care for people in that company. The whole thought is that everyone is replaceable. Everyone is useless.”
Long list of systemic problems
Arezzi left Curaleaf in February 2024, after almost six years of employment, because she said CEO Boris Jordan “screamed” at her during a company meeting the month prior, despite what she said was a stellar sales track record at the MSO. The verbal abuse and effort to embarrass her in front of her peers was the last straw.
“I just started citing what I had accomplished and what we were doing. And Boris started screaming that I was a disgrace and an embarrassment and that I was fucking up adult-use in his hometown. And everyone gasped. There were 26 people on the call,” Arezzi recalled.
Arezzi declined two severance offers from Curaleaf, in part because accepting the minimal sum offered would have muzzled her, she said. She’s now promoting her own hemp-based product brand in New York, called Chime and Chill, and couldn’t be happier that she’s no longer affiliated with Curaleaf.
Another former longtime Curaleaf worker, also a woman, echoed Arezzi and said that Curaleaf has “no real culture.”
“The culture there, it’s very much a mindset of, ‘How do we appear to care about the thing that will make consumers want to spend their money with us?’ There’s a lack of authenticity. They’re not doing things because it’s the right decision… They’re doing things because it makes them look good and because it brings shareholder value,” she said.
Yet a third woman, also a former Curaleaf executive, said the MSO has a “culture of fear.”
“It’s a culture of people not being able to speak out or be allies, because if you do, then you’re on the chopping block as well. So a lot of bad behavior is just tolerated,” she said.
In a statement to Green Market Report, Curaleaf broadly denied allegations of misogyny in its company culture, and said CEO Boris Jordan had a lengthy track record of hiring and promoting women within his various businesses over the years, including at Curaleaf.
The company also noted that it experienced multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, due largely to wider cannabis market headwinds, and suggested some of the ill feelings towards it may be due to those headcount reductions. Curaleaf also said it has “implemented a 360-degree review process for directors and above to strengthen organizational performance and foster a culture of continuous feedback.”
“Curaleaf takes pride that it fosters a corporate culture that supports its long term growth objectives and rewards people for hard work, effort, and performance,” Curaleaf said. “It’s clear that many former team members impacted by the economic environment have departed with understandably difficult feelings and frustrations, and we wish them well in their future endeavors.”
Arezzi and the other two women who spoke with Green Market Report had a long checklist of systemic problems at the MSO, with plenty of stories of how they were spoken down to, overworked, underpaid, passed over for promotion, retaliated against when they complained, and how they endured “hostile” working conditions while hoping to either be laid off or fired.
Nepotism allegations
Several of the women said that special treatment was afforded to members of Jordan’s immediate family, who all hold positions at Curaleaf. George Schidlovsky, who is Jordan’s brother-in-law, is the vice president of construction; Robert “Bobby” Sciarrone, Jordan’s son-in-law, acts as senior vice president and east regional leader; and Marina Sciarrone, Jordan’s daughter, serves as director of brand merchandise.
That nepotism was commonly known and understood among staff, according to one of the women who spoke with Green Market Report .
“After Boris made himself CEO, HR concerns were rampant, as several of his relatives were reporting either to him or each other,” she said. “Unless you’re related to Boris or married into the family, you’re just a number. They will throw you out the second they want to.”
Not only that, but some of those relatives were directly part of the “hostile” culture, and the women said they appeared to take their cues from Jordan, who several said is notoriously short-tempered.
“Many women, including me, faced hostility and harassment from George Schidlovsky … Boris’s brother-in-law,” one of the women said. “He really doesn’t like women, at all. Any woman in power, he just doesn’t like them and would antagonize us, and would find a way to blame shortcomings in his department on women leaders who worked with his team cross-functionally, not even on his team.”
During one company meeting, the woman said, Schidlovsky began “pointing and yelling at me, telling me that I was the reason we were over budget, and all the problems in the department were because of me. Mind you I did not work for (his) department.”
Arezzi said that during the meeting a year ago in which Jordan “screamed” at her, that Sciarrone also chimed in, slamming her in front of her peers as a “liar.”
Ironically, Arezzi said, Sciarrone was one of several higher-ups at Curaleaf who also somewhat undercut Jordan, with comments like “‘Everybody knows you don’t have to listen to Boris.’” Arezzi said she also heard the same sentiment from a woman in human resources when she tried filing a complaint about the meeting, that she had the option to simply ignore Jordan when he “rants and raves like a child.”
“I’m like, ‘He runs the company. That’s literally ludicrous,’” Arezzi said.
Jordan’s daughter was given her job running retail operations in New York in 2020 after her predecessor, former director of dispensary operations Mike Conway, was let go suddenly, Arezzi said.
“He came back (from vacation) and got (let go), because Boris’s daughter, Marina, wanted to be in charge of retail,” Arezzi said. “Bye, Mike.”
Scapegoating and layoffs
Another major problem that the three women noted is an overall lack of accountability, which has led to waves of employees being blamed for poor quarterly performances, which then gives management an excuse to lay off many of them and replace them with new future scapegoats.
“When you miss your numbers, then we don’t hit our promise to the shareholders, and that’s why we have rounds of people who get fired every 90 days,” Arezzi said.
And yet, Curaleaf leaders would continue spending on nonessential items, such as parties during industry conferences, the women said.
“They would host a party at MJBizCon a week after their mass layoffs,” said one of the women. “A lot of the team, we got used to seeing mass layoffs happen once or twice a year, maybe more if they were making really bad decisions.”
“We all had this mindset, ‘Are we next?’ Which created a very unhealthy atmosphere, because you were afraid to do anything wrong,” she said.
“It was genuinely something we would talk about as staff, when somebody new was hired. ‘This will be the person they use as a scapegoat when we don’t hit the numbers,’” Arezzi said.
She said the near-regular layoffs were also part of the “toxic” culture, since solution-oriented performances weren’t valued or rewarded. In that context, Curaleaf has regularly posted multimillion dollar net losses every three months for years. Through the third quarter of 2024, the company posted $144 million in net losses for the year, and in 2023, the company lost $281.2 million.
The Curaleaf culture is so overwhelmingly negative that one of the other women said she knows many employees have their fingers crossed for a pink slip.
“People have joked about wanting to be ‘next’ so they can collect their severance and find something healthy,” she said.
Overworked and underpaid
Constant work demands that led to burnout was another major theme for all three women, with no sense of any healthy work-life balance, they said.
“I got to a point I was working 80 hours a week, plus traveling,” said one of the women who asked for anonymity. “It just became really unsustainable. Sometimes I would work 20 hour days, and it just never seemed like enough… The expectation was that our livelihoods were given to us by Curaleaf, and we were supposed to essentially give that back.”
The former executive said she was eventually diagnosed with both post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorder due to how much she was overworking herself. Doctors also told her she was bordering on hypertension.
Arezzi said that one of her most eye-opening experiences came near the end of her time at Curaleaf, beginning with a medical episode her autistic son suffered in late 2023.
“My son was in ICU for 62 days, from Dec. 27 until Feb. 2, 2024, and I wasn’t able to take family leave because there was no one to do my job, and the question (from management) was, ‘Can you really afford that, given your situation, that you’re a widow?’” Arezzi recounted. “I worked New Year’s. I worked Christmas. My team worked. My operations girl passed out in the (manufacturing) facility. Nobody cared. It was batshit crazy.”
Arezzi also recalled that her assistant at the time gave birth and was unable to take maternity leave, and so “from her hospital bed, she was inputting my orders, because we didn’t have anybody else.”
At the same time there was “a lot of toxic positivity, where they were like, ‘You can do it, you’re so amazing.’ There was no, ‘We hear you, this is serious, we’ll take things off your plate.’ It was more, ‘You’re doing great, you’ve got this,’” one of the other women said.
That woman is still dealing with the physical and mental fallout on her health from her time at Curaleaf.
“I’m still in therapy. PTSD … is never something I expected to feel from work,” she said.
Words matter
All three women also reported a trend of misogynistic language towards women from many of the male managers and executives at Curaleaf, ranging from blatant cursing to name-calling to passive-aggressive condescension.
“I won’t lie. The word ‘cunt’ was thrown around,” Arezzi said. “I used to get called a sandbagger every week at our corporate national and regional call… Everybody bullied me.”
It was also common for men to simply talk down to women at Curaleaf, another of the women said.
“A woman on my team … she really pushed back on the bad behavior, and anytime you do that you’re always told to ‘play nice,’” one of the women said. “Or if they wanted to be cute, they’d say ‘You’re being a little spicy. Tone it down.’”
Arezzi said she was also routinely told she was “difficult” or “emotional” by male colleagues when she said she was simply being a hard-nosed businesswoman and attentive to detail.
“The head of operations on a team meeting in front of every team leader called me ‘difficult,’” Arezzi recalled. “‘This is why we hate working with you, because you’re so difficult.’ And I laughed, and I said, ‘I am difficult. I’m difficult to lie to. I’m difficult to mislead. And I’m difficult to work with when you show up unprepared.’”
Racist language is also “rampant” at Curaleaf, one of the women said. She called out one former Arizona executive by name, Steve Cottrell, who was also named in Kelly Sarratt’s lawsuit in Arizona, and said Cottrell would “literally say things like, ‘We’re not hiring the n-word on our team.’ Just crazy stuff.”
“Racist language is used by many white males at the company,” another woman said. She cited an example from Tribble’s Massachusetts lawsuit, in which CEO Boris Jordan allegedly used derogatory language to refer to immigrants and social equity license candidates.
“The one thing (Tribble) did not hold back on is how disgusted she was when she was in a meeting with Boris and he kept referring to people as ‘illegals,’ and using language that was very derogatory towards various communities that weren’t your stereotypical successful white person,” she said. “It was known that Boris would use derogatory language towards minority groups, specifically those without citizenship.”
The three all said they all completely believe the allegations in Tribble’s lawsuit, despite the denials from Curaleaf.
“The only people white men want to take direction from less than white middle-aged women is Black middle-aged women,” Arezzi said.
