Rowena Chiu makes for an unlikely villain.
In 2017, Chiu helped expose Harvey Weinstein, playing a pivotal role in the dawning of a survivors-led campaign against sexual violence. In a groundbreaking New York Times piece that included the stories of several women, Chiu said Weinstein, the former CEO of Hollywood studio Miramax, attempted to rape her when she worked as his assistant in 1998.
More recently, though, Chiu has found herself at the center of another kind of struggle: a clash over a controversial ethnic studies course in the heart of Silicon Valley. Only this time, she’s being cast as the bad guy.
Chiu, a mother of four who moved to Palo Alto in 2009, was elected to the school board late last year. During her campaign, she and two other candidates promised to suspend a plan for a mandatory ethnic studies course for high school freshmen in the Palo Alto Unified School District. On Jan. 23, just weeks after the three new members started their terms — and three days after President Donald Trump took office, heightening tensions around teaching DEI in schools — the board called a special meeting to hear public input and vote on the matter.
The forum lasted nearly five hours, with students, teachers, and community members speaking passionately in favor of mandating the course at the start of the next school year. A smaller group, most of them speaking virtually, asked the board members to press pause until the district could provide clarity on the curriculum. Among their concerns: that a curriculum that categorizes different people as either “oppressors” or “oppressed” could end up creating more divisions within the student body and broader community. Parents’ public records requests to clarify the curriculum had gone unanswered for months, leading some to question what the board was even voting on.
Throughout the meeting, Chiu asked probing questions about the ethnic studies curriculum. Some of her inquiries were met with jeers from the standing-room-only crowd. At one point, a teacher seemed to deride Chiu’s credentials.
About halfway through the meeting, Chiu commented that the community feedback was making her feel “unsafe.” The district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, Danaé Reynolds, expressed concern that the word was being misused, suggesting that “uncomfortable” might be more accurate. Reynolds, who is Black, implied that “unsafe” would be more appropriately applied to situations like her husband getting pulled over and not “coming home.”
It’s unclear whether Reynolds, who could not be reached for comment, was directly responding to Chiu’s comments. But Chiu took her words personally.
As the board got closer to its decision — voting 3-2 in favor of making ethnic studies a requirement — the room felt like a powder keg. On Jan. 27, Chiu reposted a message from a social media account called Asians Against Wokeness that blasted Reynolds for lecturing Chiu on the word “unsafe.” The account — Chiu says she is not affiliated with it — highlights crimes and injustices committed against Asian Americans and includes racially charged and racist language.
“I am a Harvey Weinstein Survivor,” Chiu wrote in her repost. “In 1998, Weinstein told me, as he attempted to rape me, that he ‘liked Chinese girls, because they’re discreet.’ In 2025, as an elected official, I spoke up about Asian oppression, and I was suppressed yet again.”
The message Chiu reposted included Reynolds’ headshot and résumé. Several racist remarks were left in the comments section, targeted at the school administrator. The hate didn’t stop there: Reynolds reportedly received online harassment and death threats as a result of the post. (Chiu, who has also received threats in recent days, later deleted her repost.)
The backlash against Chiu came fast and furious. Within days, the union representing Palo Alto school administrators called for her resignation, writing that her “continued presence on the board not only undermines the district’s ability to lead effectively but also sets a dangerous precedent that racism and divisive rhetoric will go unchallenged.” Thirteen former Palo Alto school board trustees issued a statement publicly condemning Chiu for her “detrimental, unprofessional, and unacceptable” use of social media.
On Feb. 4, Chiu issued a statement apologizing for her “poor judgment,” saying she never meant to cause harm and is especially pained by “hate speech directed at other women of color.” But by then, the situation had snowballed.
In addition to calls for Chiu’s resignation, board president Shana Segal asked the trustees to approve a resolution effectively censuring Chiu and keeping her from taking on committee assignments, saying the move was aimed at restoring “trust in board governance.” The vote takes place Tuesday evening.
‘Personally persecuted’
A few days before the board would decide what to do about Chiu, I met her at her home in Palo Alto. It’s a modest house, by Silicon Valley standards, with several pairs of rainboots scattered outside the front door. Chiu is hyper-aware that all four of her kids’ school principals have signed the letter calling for her resignation. She’s worried that the aftermath of the dispute will create a hostile atmosphere for her children or even threaten their safety. Friends have stepped in to walk her younger kids home from school. (Full disclosure: Two of my children attend Palo Alto public schools, and the oldest participated in a pilot of the ethnic studies course.)
“This has been much harder than MeToo,” Chiu told me. The campaign against sexual violence attracted naysayers and crazies, but it was mostly “unknown keyboard warriors” lobbing ridiculous threats and accusations. “They weren’t people who share a school playground with your children. The personal element of this — I find it really terrifying.”
Chiu comes across as a calm but confident communicator. A British citizen who originally hails from Berkshire, just west of London, she has a soft yet deliberate way of speaking. “It’s hard not to feel personally persecuted,” she said. “There’s very much a concerted effort to discredit me and discredit all of the things I’ve said.”
In the weeks since the board meeting, the campaign against her has expanded beyond reactions to her retweet. One former board trustee asked for proof of Chiu’s credentials with the World Bank, where she works as a consultant. (Chiu says she provided her employment contract.) Chiu has repeatedly said she is in favor of an ethnic studies course and even pointed to one she has taught at UC Berkeley. But this too has been questioned, with opponents pointing out that she is not employed by the university. (She is not a tenured professor but a guest lecturer.)
But even before the school board elections, Chiu experienced what she characterizes as unfair scrutiny and bias. Though around 40% of the student body in Palo Alto public schools is Asian American — the largest ethnic group in the district — “historically, there has not been very much Asian American representation within the school administration and the board,” said Sophia Yang, a recent Palo Alto graduate and Chiu supporter.
During Chiu’s campaign last year, people called her at home from blocked numbers, leaving nasty messages. Someone showed up at a campaign event and told her that Asian parents “can’t be trusted with their own children.”
“I experienced a lot of racism during my campaign,” Chiu said. “Several people said to me, ‘We heard you’re an extremist, that you burn books, that you’re a spy for the Chinese government.’”
Chiu forged on, buoyed by the support of parents who agreed with her opposition to another hot-button issue: “de-laning,” or placing students of different academic levels in courses together. Chiu ran on a platform of “academic acceleration,” the belief that students should have a choice of classes based on both competency and interest.
“I was directly told [during the campaign] that only Asian and Jewish families could possibly want multivariable calculus,” said Chiu. The advanced math class, which is not currently available on Palo Alto high school campuses, has been a source of heated debate in the district.
All of the tension boiled over at the Jan. 23 board meeting, according to Chiu and others who were present. “It was chaos,” said Allyson Rosen, whose daughter graduated from Palo Alto High School last year.
“I don’t want to say it was negative, but it was certainly passionate,” said Faizan Kashmiri, a senior at Palo Alto High School who supported Chiu’s campaign for school board, partly because she showed the most interest in what students thought — whether she agreed with them or not. Still, Kashmiri did not see eye to eye with her on the ethnic studies debate — he was one of several students who spoke publicly in defense of making the course a requirement.
“A major part of American history is not known,” he said. “For that reason, we should absolutely push through with this program, teaching Black and brown students that they have a part in this history.”
Several parents at the meeting also spoke passionately about the urgency of making ethnic studies a requirement. “Being of Mexican descent, I always wanted my story represented in history classes,” said Veronica Saleh, a parent of two. “The teachers have been working on this [curriculum] for two years, but many of us have been wanting more accurate history for decades.”
Saleh said Chiu’s description of the room as hostile or unsafe was a mischaracterization. Jennifer DiBrienza, a former board trustee who watched the meeting virtually, said she found it to be a “typically passionate board meeting.”
Throughout the meeting, which was captured in a five-hour video that can be seen on the school district’s YouTube channel, board president Segal can be heard asking attendees to refrain from clapping or audibly reacting to comments. But this request was not enforced (including when Segal spoke), and cheers and jeers can be heard repeatedly.
“I spent eight years on that dais,” said DiBrienza, who is among the former trustees who signed the letter condemning Chiu. “We worked through school renaming, Covid closures, conversations about whether to add multivariable calculus. This was not a ‘top 20’ stressful meeting.”
Chiu contends that she understands that her role as a board member is to make tough decisions in tough environments, and that the room won’t always be “warm.” “However, I thought that this was particularly biased in one direction,” she said. “And I think that, combined with the pressure of being a new board member, that made it particularly difficult. So I did find that to be really a lot of pressure, and that’s why I made the comment about feeling unsafe.”
‘An obligation to step down’
Chiu asserts that the vast majority of parents she’s talked to, across racial, geographic, and religious lines, support ethnic studies. But they disagree on the Palo Alto district’s rollout.
“Unlike the MeToo movement, we all want the same thing here,” she said. “We all want our children to be safe, to be well-educated, to appreciate nuance, to be productive, to be happy. … But the way we think we can achieve this for our children differs.”
For better or worse, Chiu has become a spokesperson for those in Palo Alto who don’t feel that their voices and fears have been adequately considered. “The Asian American immigrant community feels like they have less of a voice sometimes,” said Yang, the recent high school graduate. “They all really thought that Rowena was representing their views really well. And she listens. Her being on the board is very reassuring to me and gives me hope for other Asian American students such as myself, that we have representation.”
Such sentiments have complicated Chiu’s decision about how to respond to the pressure campaign to oust her.
“When you have the teachers union associating you with hate speech and bigotry, I think the answer should be obvious — that I almost have an obligation to step down,” she said. “But on the other side of things, I’m getting calls from terrified parents, largely from the Asian and Jewish communities … saying that our voice hasn’t been represented, and you are the only person who is able to and has the courage to speak out about these communities.”
Just over 19,000 Palo Alto residents voted for Chiu in November, more votes than any other candidate. A recent statement signed by more than 2,200 residents said Chiu conducted herself with “integrity and thoughtfulness” throughout the board meeting, and when she “bravely expressed concerns many in our community shared with her, she was treated with disrespect and even defiance.”
Even some in the student community who disagree with Chiu have expressed their desire for her to remain on the school board. On Monday afternoon, the editors of The Campanile, the student news site for Palo Alto High, published an op-ed saying Chiu’s resignation would set a “dangerous precedent.”
The piece argued that Chiu should be given “appropriate time to rectify a mistake,” especially because she is supported by a “large community within our district.” Kashmiri, the student who spoke out in favor of ethnic studies, called the episode a “bump in the road” for Chiu, “and it’s not necessarily impossible to get up from.”
Still, calls for Chiu’s resignation have gotten louder, and there are murmurs of a recall campaign if she doesn’t step down voluntarily. Segal, the board president, has said that if Chiu remains on the board, she’ll have to take steps to fix a breakdown in trust, including issuing another apology, personal and private, to Reynolds.
Chiu admits to feeling conflicted, more saddened than defiant. She says she is between a rock and a hard place, trying to decide whether to step down or stick it out. The sexual assault survivor knew that entering public office would put the spotlight on her once again, and that she would be tasked with making difficult decisions on behalf of those who voted for her. She just had no idea just how personal it would get.