Sé Reed, a former WordPress Marketing Team rep and president of the newly incorporated WP Community Collective, claims she’s been the target of “extreme retaliation” in a new WordPress code of conduct complaint against co-founder Matt Mullenweg.
The report, sent to the WordPress Incident Response Team (IRT) on January 23, alleged that Mullenweg engaged in a pattern of retaliatory behavior after Reed first reported him to the IRT for bullying and harassment in September 2023. That initial complaint followed community concerns that WordPress.com plugin listings were outranking WordPress.org listings in Google Search results.
Though the IRT upheld Reed’s claims and asked Mullenweg to publicly apologize—which he did, though it was unqualified—she says his “overt retaliation and defamation” continued. In her latest report, she claims the disbandment of the marketing team—which she led in 2023—was a retaliatory move designed to exclude her and others from actively contributing to the WordPress project.
Reed also cites the deactivation of her WordPress.org account last month and Mullenweg’s subsequent post, Joost/Karim Fork, which falsely linked her to Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi’s so-called WordPress fork, as further evidence that Mullenweg violated the WordPress code of conduct.
“The fallout from Matt’s post on WordPress.org has been severe,” Reed said in her report. “These false and misleading claims have been amplified by TechCrunch, Slashdot, and other globally recognized tech media outlets, where I am named and directly linked. This has caused significant professional harm and disruption, as well as personal distress and disruption.”
Reed also noted that while Mullenweg had announced he was deactivating the accounts of five WordPress.org users, two of those users—Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Heather Burns—hadn’t been active in the WordPress project since 2019, and two others—de Valk and Marucchi—didn’t have their accounts deactivated at the time. That left Reed as the only actively contributing user affected.
The Repository has verified that de Valk and Marucchi’s WordPress.org accounts were deactivated on January 28 — 17 days after Mullenweg announced that he was blocking the pair.
“These actions are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern of harassment, bullying, and retaliation I have endured from Matt over the past 2+ years,” Reed stated in her report.
“Each action, from the dissolution of my [marketing] team to my public defamation, reflects a calculated effort to ostracize me from my community and professionally harm me.”
Reed asked the IRT and WordPress leadership to address the harassment, disclose the reason for her WordPress.org ban, reinstate her account, and publicly apologize for the deactivation.
“It is my hope that this report will prompt meaningful action and enable our community to hold those who cause continual harm accountable for their actions,” Reed concluded.
WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard told The Repository that she was made aware of Reed’s complaint on January 31. She said some of Reed’s concerns had been addressed while others remained under active review.
Hubbard said Reed’s report included requests that fell outside the scope of the IRT or the WordPress Code of Conduct. “We look forward to continuing our dialogue directly with Sé,” Hubbard said, without specifying which issues were being reviewed.
Hubbard’s response followed an email the IRT sent to Reed on January 29 acknowledging receipt of her report. The email stated that while the IRT had reviewed her allegations, it lacked the authority to enforce or address the issues raised.
“Based on the experiences and events after your last report, the team feels that the issues you reported are something we don’t have ways to enforce or work with,” the IRT wrote. “This is a bit unfortunate, and we understand that it might not be the response you want to hear.”
Reed’s case comes amid long-standing governance and transparency concerns within the WordPress project. In December, 20 veteran core committers and contributors published an open letter urging Mullenweg to propose “community-minded” solutions to governance issues. In November, core committers also raised concerns about a “culture of fear” within the project, citing Mullenweg’s “outsized control” and the potentially career-ending consequences of speaking out against him.
Featured image credit: Raquel Manriquez.
Updated, 6 February 2025: A previous version of the article said that Hubbard was made aware of Reed’s complaint on January 26 when it was actually January 31. The article was also updated to clarify that Mullenweg’s apology was unqualified.
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