

This sucks. Your coworker misjudged a situation and seems to be unfairly misjudging you because of it. I can understand why that would create tension and discomfort.
Can you try to talk to her about it? Approach her and ask if you can have a few minutes of her time. Then try to explain that you didn’t mean any offense because you were talking about the low quality of the photography, not about the people in it and it didn’t occur that someone might take it to be about the people. After her reaction it clicked that it could look/sound that way, but that was genuinely not the intent or your thought process at all.
Heck, you could also take a good selfie and a bad selfie (or internet examples of this) and show her those as an example to highlight that the same subject in different settings can look starkly different, and that was what you were commenting on, not the subjects themselves. Hopefully that would clear it up.
This approach would take some humility to concede some to her perception of you doing something wrong because doing so might soften her up enough to actually listen to you, but I want to clarify that I don’t think you did anything wrong (and FWIW, I’m a woman).
Do you need to do this? No. But it’s clearly eating at you, and this is a way that might put it to bed. And if she doubles down and gets worse, then you know you really should put distance in how you interact with this person.
Like the other commenter said, it might be worth mentioning to your manager first though, especially if you have a good relationship there. Doing so covers several bases:
- If she was spiteful enough to report you for what she perceived to be happening, you have the real version out there.
- Your manager may have a recommendation on how to approach her better than what I said since they actually know each other.
- Your manager may recommend not reaching out, for whatever reason. One possibility, maybe this coworker is known to stir the pot and this could be another example. Sometimes there are performance things spoken about only at the manager level.
I wish you luck and peace in moving on from this. It’s stressful to be accused of something you haven’t done because of a misunderstanding (I’ve been there).
Yeah… her being in a higher position does add complexity. But you also have the coworker whose photo you were specifically talking about to back you up, right?
If one of the guys who reports to me told me this, I’d probably give them the same advice as I gave you, but add an offer talk to her for him. (But tbf I’ve received enough feedback to know I’m not exactly an average manager.)
You’re compassionate enough to know that you’re in the 1% on this and don’t seem resentful about that, so I’m sure people in your workplace see that in you. I don’t think talking about this is inherently “complaining,” as you put it, and how you present it could help a lot.
I keep a framework about giving feedback in my back pocket to use and share all the time, and I can’t help but share it here. It recommends formatting the feedback in 4 steps (with an example of what you might say for each part):
It’s from a training called Radical Candor and they call it CORE, but c’mon, it’s CORNS! 🌽 I hope it might help you!