I’ll try to be succinct - colleagues in a different team made a big change without consulting internally that already is and will continue to impact on my ability to do my job effectively and efficiently. This has/will affect others and we have all had a moan, but I’m the only one who has openly said that the change will cause significant grief. The change will be very expensive for the company in both short and long term, plus we will be non-compliant in a highly regulated industry for several months leading to genuine vulnerabilities in safety. We’d originally heard that they were dabbling in this area, so had a meeting to say please by mindful of x, y, z because they go hand in hand with a, b, c and we mustn’t do anything to jeopardise meeting the new regs deadline at end ‘23. We became aware that they’d ignored our warnings in September and I’ve been waving red flags since, written Briefs for my boss, meetings with all stakeholders etc. We’re no further forward to mitigating the ‘damage’, it is incredibly frustrating, not least because the colleagues that made the change have been arse-covering big style. Last week in yet another internal meeting, a senior Legal manager asked a colleague to summarise the history, he replied that he would put it into an email. When he wrote the email he said x, y, z are significant issues, Dilemmaville knows more about the impact on her work of x, y, z, she will need to explain. I wrote the history from perspective of my specialism. The next day, the Director of the team that made the changes, wrote a scathing message to me, copying in lots of others, saying that they’d had to make the changes because I’d been doing something wrong and that the company was vulnerable as a result. He asserted that I’d been allowed to break rules and go unchallenged as if I was a maverick, he said he didn’t know how that had happened, but they’d sorted it out so never mind about the difficult interim period of the change, it will all work out for the best. The language was patronising and the content was full of factual errors, none of it was true. The truth is that I had not been doing anything wrong, there was no behaviour outside of rules or regulations and I have my boss and many colleagues to back me up on that. He was basically gaslighting that the change was doing everyone a favour because I’d made the company vulnerable and the change was best for the company. He was doing it to cover up his team’s incompetence in not listening to our warnings or doing any internal consultations. I am very angry about this slur on my reputation, I have not only done nothing wrong, but other companies look to ours to see how it is done, I am well known and have an excellent reputation. I was not the only one to moan, the moaning was entirely justified. I was so angry about the email I sent it to my boss to ask if I could write a rebuttal (we normally avoid email spats). He spoke to the other Director (they are mates) and he admitted he’d done it to be spiteful (wtf?) because I’d written the history. My boss defended me, and received an apology, but I think the apology should be made to me and my boss agrees. I’d like a full apply and I’d like to copy a rebuttal to the distribution of the scathing email. WWYD? I am currently minded to raise a personal grievance, but I realise that will blow up everything. If I ignore it and let the lies stand unchallenged, mud will stick. If I raise a grievance, my card will be marked so I’ll need to leave before I’m pushed. I just want my unblemished reputation back, none of this is fair, I don’t deserve any of it.