Business

Mom slams AOL’s CEO in ‘babies’ fiasco

Tim Armstrong got spanked big-time on Sunday, and now he says he’s sorry.

The AOL chief executive sheepishly apologized to an outraged mother who blasted him for blaming the cost of caring for a pair of “distressed babies” as a reason for cutting employee retirement benefits.

Brooklyn’s Deanna Fei revealed that she was the mother of one of two babies Armstrong referred to in an AOL town hall meeting Feb. 6, when he announced the company was cutting its match for 401(k) contributions.

Fei’s baby daughter was born nearly four months premature in 2012 and needed months in intensive care before being healthy enough to go home. Her daughter is a healthy toddler today, but Fei, in an essay published online Sunday, attacked Armstrong’s handling of the situation.

“The hardest thing to bear has been the whiff of judgment in [the] statement, as if we selfishly gobbled up an obscenely large slice of the collective health care pie,” Fei wrote in her piece on Slate.com.

Armstrong called Fei and apologized, she said in an interview broadcast on the NBC Nightlky News.

Fei didn’t respond to requests for comment, and AOL declined to comment.

Armstrong, while announcing unexpectedly strong fourth quarter profits on Feb. 6, said AOL would not match 401(k) contribution every paycheck but instead would make annual contributions. He cited the healthcare cost of the babies as a contributing factor.

“We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general,” Armstrong said on the call. “Those are the things that add up into our benefits cost.”

The CEO, no stranger to apologizing for his runaway mouth, backpedaled from the decision Feb. 8 amid a storm of criticism.

“On a personal note, I made a mistake and I apologize for my comments last week at the town hall when I mentioned specific health-care examples in trying to explain our decision making process around our employee benefit programs,” Armstrong wrote.

Fei, a writer whose husband is an editor for AOL’s news site, took aim at Armstrong’s willingness to cite the cost of her baby’s emergency care, despite the fact that he raked in $12 million in pay in 2012.

“He exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting,” Fei fumed.

In the piece, Fei detailed the months of dramatic uncertainty she and her husband suffered as their daughter struggled for life.

“Since her arrival, I’ve rarely been free from some form of torment over her premature birth,” Fei wrote. “The months of pumping breast milk for a baby who might not live to drink it. The anxieties about every milestone: Will she smile? Will she lift her head? Will she crawl, talk, sing?”

In August, in another AOL town hall meeting, Armstrong abruptly fired an exec who was taking a photo of the employees at the meeting to post on a company website. The firing was captured on an audio recording.

After the audio went viral, he apologized.