(Bloomberg) -- After Jamie Fiore Higgins was promoted inside Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the veteran she replaced pinned her to the wall of their New York office and lifted her by the jaw. At a work conference, one of her bosses at the bank propositioned her. When she got up from her desk in Goldman’s headquarters to pump milk for her fourth child, a longtime trader mooed at her. 

Those are some of the allegations she makes in a memoir, “Bully Market,” due to be published this August. On Wall Street, it’s unusual to make it into the club of Goldman managing directors, as she did in 2012, and almost unheard of to tell the world what goes on there. 

The book will make Fiore Higgins one of the most senior people to do it -- Greg Smith, who released “Why I Left Goldman Sachs” a decade ago, was a Wall Street deckhand by comparison. 

The biggest US banks, all run by men until Jane Fraser broke Citigroup Inc.’s glass ceiling last year, have said they’re trying to boost gender and racial representation. Goldman named what it called its most diverse class of new managing directors, though the bank is losing senior Black women. It’s also fighting one of the industry’s biggest gender discrimination lawsuits, recently asking a judge to keep the names of two senior executives mentioned in internal complaints hidden from the public. 

“We strongly disagree with Ms. Higgins’ characterization of Goldman Sachs’ culture, and we decline to respond to anonymized allegations,” Maeve DuVally, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs, said in an emailed statement. Fiore Higgins, who left the bank in 2016, declined to comment.

Fiore Higgins changed colleague names, created composites, compressed time and recreated dialogue, she writes in an author’s note in an advance proof. Everything in the book happened to her, it says, and she wrote with the aid of journals, correspondence and conversations with family and friends. 

“‘Bully Market’ is a rare account from inside Goldman Sachs by one of its high-ranking women,” Cat Boyd, a spokesperson for publisher Simon & Schuster, wrote in an email.

The book chronicles “a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color,” the publisher’s website says. “Despite Goldman Sachs having the right talking points and statistics, Fiore Higgins soon realized that these provided a veneer.”

In the book, the attack is one of the bleakest moments in a career spanning 1998 to 2016. When Fiore Higgins takes over as a team manager from a colleague who was apparently having an affair with a client, she tells him she’s moving him off that account. He wraps his hand under her jaw until she thinks she’ll pass out. A day later, their boss tells her not to report it to human resources. After years go by, she makes a complaint about a different offense to employee relations, thinking it’s anonymous, though that boss somehow finds out and warns her not to take complaints outside the team.

But “Bully Market” also vividly narrates her own moral slide, when the lure of money transformed her from a frightened Wall Street rookie into a veteran who humiliated new recruits and enjoyed watching them squirm. It describes the near-collapse of her marriage, her Xanax use, and the toll taken on bankers who do work they despise.

Though “Bully Market” doesn’t disclose details about her work or clients, she joined as an analyst in 1998, when she graduated with a bachelor’s in mathematics from Bryn Mawr, covered hedge fund clients, co-managed a lending team in 2006 and 2007, and was managing a team inside the securities lending group in 2014, according to an online biography for a recruiting trip to the college in 2014. She’s now a professional coach who helps teens build leadership skills and professionals navigate the workforce, her author biography says.

Fiore Higgins writes in an epilogue that it would be naive to hope the cultural shifts from the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter have made her account outdated. Addressing Goldman executives directly, she asks them to give more independence to human resources, stop middle managers from standing in the way of change, and be as cutthroat about inclusion as profit. 

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