Most writing about difficult workplaces stops at recognition. It hands you a list of traits, helps you name what is happening, but leaves you there: Ten signs of a toxic boss, Seven types of workplace bully, etc.
You finish the article knowing what to call it and no more able to do anything about it than when you started.
The part that changes an outcome is the part almost nobody writes: which of the things happening to you the law actually reaches, which of them starts a clock, and which are simply lawful and awful. Those three categories look identical from inside the situation.
They are not remotely the same, and the difference decides whether you have a claim, a complaint, or a bad year.
Puppet Proof works that line.
What that means in practice
Every page starts from the primary source. Not a summary of a summary — the statute, the regulation, the court opinion, the agency’s own guidance, read directly and quoted where the exact words matter. When a page tells you an EEOC charge must be signed and verified, the words are from 29 C.F.R. § 1601.9 and the citation is there so you can check it in about forty seconds.
That method produces a fair amount of bad news, and the pages carry it rather than softening it. Workplace mobbing is not illegal in the United States as such. Favoritism is lawful until it runs through something a statute names. Most of what makes a workplace unbearable is legal.
Being told that early is worth considerably more than being told what you were hoping for, because it redirects your effort to the part that can still move.
It also means correcting the record when the record is wrong. A widely republished figure on the cost of workplace bullying turns out to be a five-year total presented as an annual one — wrong by a factor of five, and repeated across dozens of sites that never opened the source. Where that happens, the page says so and shows the arithmetic.
What this site is not
It is not a law firm and it is not legal advice. Nothing here can account for the law of your state, the precedent in your federal circuit, or the specific facts of your situation. And on some questions those three things are the entire answer.
Where a deadline or a decision is close, the right move is an employment attorney where you live, and several pages here say exactly that at the point it becomes true.
It is also not neutral about who it is for. These pages are written for the person the process is happening to, not for the manager running it or the HR team documenting it. That shows in what gets explained: not how to conduct a fair investigation, but what your actual rights are inside one.
Who writes it
David M. is not a lawyer and has no legal training. He started the site after finding that the available advice ran out exactly where it started to matter — where naming the problem ends and doing something about it begins.
Everything published here is checked against its primary source before it goes up, and re-checked on a schedule. How that works, and what the “Verified” date in each byline means, is set out in the editorial policy.
If you think something here is wrong, say so — contact@puppetproof.com. Corrections get checked against the source and noted on the page.