A pair of cofounders at an LA-based law firm resigned Monday after The Post exposed blatantly racist and sexist emails the two sent while at their old firm.
John Barber and Jeffrey Ranen — who launched their new “compassionate” firm Barber Ranen just last month — stepped down from their positions at the request of the company, CEO Tim Graves said in a statement Monday.
Barber, 55, had been the firm’s managing partner. Ranen, 45, had been serving as its chief financial officer.
The two apologized on Monday by releasing a joint statement that said their resignations would “allow our friends and colleagues to continue on without the cloud of our conduct” interrupting their work.
“The last 72 hours have been the most difficult of our lives, as we have had to acknowledge and reckon with those emails,” they said. “They are not, in any way, reflections of the contents of our hearts, or our true values.”
Graves, in his statement, said Barber Ranen will “form a new firm” and noted equity partners expressed “their disappointment and disdain for the language” the cofounders used in the offending emails.
The now-embattled pair had recently split from the California mega-law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith to start their own venture.
The emails, which included homophobic and antisemitic missives, were first by The Post over the weekend.
Ranen, on at least three occasions, described female attorneys as “c—ts” and Barber once emailed Ranen “kill her by anal penetration” in June 2012 when reacting to an overtime request from another Lewis Brisbois attorney.
A Los Angeles judge was described as “sugar t-ts” when Barber joked about how a judge liked to be addressed in a March 2022 email, and in November 2012, Ranen emailed Barber that another partner had “huge t-ts.”
Barber in November 2013 snidely spelled out “n—-r” when replying to a Lewis Brisbois partner who told him that people were upset during a mediation because of a witness’ frequent use of the N-word.
On May 31, 2020 — just days after the death of George Floyd — Ranen emailed Barber, “F–king looters came within a mile and a half. I can’t even imagine what it was like living in Larchmont [Los Angeles] in 1992 when the savages decimated Koreatown.”
Barber responded: “Just to illustrate my enlightenment . . . As buildings burned within a mile or so that night, we had a party, got wasted, and yelled inappropriate things from the balcony.”
The partners also commonly used the word f—-t and other anti-LGBTQ slurs.
Ranen, in a March 2014 email to Barber, said he typically will email work questions to a Jewish lawyer outside of Lewis Brisbois Saturday morning, during the Jewish Sabbath.
“This Jew is cracking me up,” Ranen wrote to Barber, who responded, “Jew hater.”
In a statement to The Post over the weekend, Lewis Brisbois, which has more than 1,600 attorneys on staff, said they were “shocked” by the behavior of the former partners and promised a probe.
“Following their departure from our firm, a complaint was lodged against John Barber and Jeff Ranen to a member of our management committee. In keeping with our firm’s policies and our responsibility to our personnel, an investigation was undertaken and the firm was shocked to find dozens of emails between John Barber and Jeff Ranen containing highly inappropriate and offensive content,” part of the company’s statement said.
The two men left their former law firm in May, taking more than 100 lawyers with them, to “build something that’s reflective of our values and our beliefs,” Barber previously told Above The Law.
“We wanted to lead with empathy, collaboration and compassion, to do it our way and not have any baggage,” Ranen previously told the Los Angeles Business Journal about the formation of Barber Ranen.
Both men were still listed on Barber Ranen’s website as of Monday evening.
With Post wires
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