To those of you who have been following Niki Dakota’s social media posts, we ask you to consider that there are two sides to the story she has been telling about her departure from WYSO. And, those two sides diverge very significantly.
While we do not wish to engage in a back-and-forth debate regarding what led to Niki’s resignation, we can say that we tried to retain her as an employee and she resigned. It is apparent that since her resignation her focus has been to damage WYSO. If she is successful, it affects our ability to fulfill our public service mission for our listeners. As such, we can no longer remain silent in response to Niki’s damaging social media posts.
We understand that many of you have empathy for her; we do, too. That is why we attempted to communicate with her after she resigned. We offered several forms of assistance to lessen the impact upon her, including severance, which we comment on here only because she has already disclosed it. While she attempts to mock severance now, we made a generous offer for our small station – an offer that she accepted and signed for. It is unfortunate that she now claims she did not already accept that offer.
We also invited her on multiple occasions to come to the station to pack her belongings herself. She failed to do so. Instead of simply disposing of the items she left, we hired professionals to carefully pack and deliver her personal items to her home on a date and time repeatedly communicated to her in advance. Her items were only placed on her porch because she did not open the door for the movers.
We have at every turn been fair and amicable with Niki but we also have an obligation to be fair to the hardworking, loyal, and mission-driven members of our team and to fulfill our public service mission to our listeners. Every action taken with regard to Niki has been in accordance with those guideposts.