It was a cool, mostly cloudy Thursday in late October when two men in suits turned up outside the Portland home of Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a DEI executive between jobs. According to a sentencing memo that would be filed by her lawyers months later, Furlow-Smiles knew she was in trouble because, let’s face it, “no one wears suits in Oregon."
Eight months earlier, Furlow-Smiles had been laid off from Nike, where she’d been the senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for more than a year. This role followed a nearly five-year stint in a similar job at Facebook (now Meta) in San Francisco. That fall day, she had just returned to Portland from a job interview with Pixar in Emeryville, Calif., and was at home with her daughter, who is nine.
