According to a lawsuit filed this week in Washington, one of Meta’s earliest employees is suing the company for sexual harassment, sexism and retaliation.
Kelly Stonelake, who spent 15 years at the company and promoted to the rank of supervision, claimed in the lawsuit that he faced a cycle of gender discrimination and harassment until he was fired in January shortly after his employment in 2009. It’s there. 2024.
She alleges in the lawsuit that Metah did not take action after reporting sexual harassment and assault. She retaliated against her after flagging her video game products as racist. And it was carried over on a daily basis for promotions that supported men in her team.
By the time she was fired, Stonelake said in a lawsuit that was on long medical leave due to post-traumatic stress disorder. She is still undergoing treatment as her mental state was severely damaged by working on alleged discriminatory conditions in meta, according to a lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court in Washington.
Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton declined to comment that the lawsuit would cite pending cases.
The lawsuit is because Meta and founder Mark Zuckerberg experience an evolution that appears to be moving towards political rights. Zuckerberg sat behind President Trump at the inauguration, placing UFC boss Dana White (friends, donors, Trump supporters) on Meta’s board of directors, and public policy staff from politically correct communications reporting I started hiring.
Meta also eliminated third-party fact-checking and halted its greatest diversity, equity and inclusion program, namely acting in line with Trump’s policies. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg went to Joe Rogan’s podcast and lamented that companies needed “masculine energy” because they “castrate” the workplace when “female energy” was too much. As of 2023, approximately 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs were male.
Speaking with her attorney, Stonelake told TechCrunch that the events described in her case represent a larger pattern of abuse in the meta.
“We have decided to file a lawsuit, if not the only, if not the best, that promotes accountability in the meta,” she told TechCrunch. “Meta has the opportunity to do harm on a scale that only high-tech companies can do.”
“It was supposed to be a place where we could release steam.”
Stonelake began working for Facebook in 2009. This was when friends with “Like” button and “Tag” were still new innovations with status updates. The company has not yet been made public and has not been made into a drama on the big screen of “Social Networks.”
She worked at Palo Alto Office along with a man who was a decades-old senior, to build opportunities for businesses to use Facebook, she told TechCrunch.
In her lawsuit, she alleges that sexual harassment began almost immediately.
During the first weeks of employment, Stone Lake claims in the lawsuit that her colleague grabbed her by the crotch during a social gathering called the “league.”
The league was a popular event for employees to communicate with others during long and tough working hours. Top ranked employees such as Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg were present, Stonelake said.
“I played beer pong with Cheryl [Sandberg] Regularly,” Stone Lake told TechCrunch. “Everyone worked so hard, so it was supposed to be a space where we could release steam.”
Through a representative, Sandberg declined to comment.
Stonelake recalls returning to shock when her colleagues grabbed her without agreeing, but she was worried about reporting the incident to Facebook’s HR department.
“I think that’s a pretty common experience for women, especially young women,” Stonelake said. “This is based on experience reporting these cases and not going anywhere.”
Stonelake stayed at work. She told TechCrunch that she was obsessed with Zuckerberg’s vision for a more connected world. However, Stone Lake claims she soon experienced sexual harassment from her manager.
During a business trip in 2011, Stone Lake alleges in the lawsuit, with her manager taking her to dinner and taking her to a hotel room where he tries to force her to do so, and I placed my hands on my pants. In the lawsuit, Stone Lake said that this same manager later said he would not receive a promotion unless she sleeps with him. When she declined, she was not promoted.
Harassment from her manager continues, she claims, and Stone Lake transferred to Seattle from her Palo Alto office in 2012. Before she transferred schools, she reported the manager due to harassment, but no action was taken and he stayed at the company for years. The lawsuit alleges.
After Stonelake moved to Seattle, she was steadily promoted in management until she reached director level in 2017. In this new role, Stonelake claims that her manager harassed her and discriminated against her, perpetuating the cycle she thought she had escaped a few years ago.
Stonelake said that when Black Lives Matter (BLM) protested in 2020, he changed his Facebook profile photo to the Blue Lives Matter symbol, which is considered to be a counter-blm response to Blum, so he confronted his manager. Details are explained. According to the lawsuit, she tells him how their diverse teams can receive photos as Meta believes employees’ personal Facebook pages reflect the company. I did.
“We explicitly communicate that it is important to consider our personal Facebook page as a senior leader in the company,” Stonelake told TechCrunch.
The Stonelake manager said, “I responded to her from the innocent black boys and during and when they got. [sic] Shot by police, they enter a gang and get involved in crime. And the real problem lies in social services and education,” the lawsuit argues.
Stonelake went to Meta’s HR, but claims she had no support. The lawsuit alleges Stonellake was handed over twice for promotion, but her male colleague has been promoted.
“We didn’t have a plan on how to keep people safe.”
Stonelake moved to Reality Labs in Meta in 2022 and led product marketing for Virtual Reality Social Network and Horizon Worlds. She told TechCrunch that she was excited to tackle such a central product of Zuckerberg’s imaginary metaverse.
Stonelake says he led a “go to market” strategy to guide Horizon Worlds to a wider audience and open access to teenagers, international markets and mobile device users.
However, as a leader in this product, Stonelake raised concerns that Horizon Worlds does not have the right safety system to keep minor users away from the platform. She also claims in the suit that she flagged patterns of racist behavior in apps that proliferated due to a lack of robust content moderation tools.
“The Leadership Team recognized that in one test users with black avatars entered the platform, which took an average of 34 seconds before being called racial slurs, including “N-word” or “monkey.” “Ah,” Suit claims.
“We’re expanding rapidly and we had no plans for how to keep people safe,” Stonelake told TechCrunch.
Stonelake says he was removed from his weekly leadership meetings after raising these concerns. Stone Lake was subsequently denied another promotion in January 2023, according to the lawsuit.
She then went on emergency medical leave to receive treatment for suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit. Stonelake was informed that he would be let go in January 2024 as part of a massive layoff for Meta.
Looking back at her time in Meta, Stone Lake remembers the joy of watching Zuckerberg’s march alongside LGBTQ+ employees and allies during the 2013 San Francisco Pride Festival. We expand the circle of people we consider to be “one of us.” For us, it now covers the whole world. ”
Now, Stone Lake says she realizes that those actions may have been a performance.
“I’m becoming more and more senior, and I thought I could only protect more people in order to change the culture,” Stonelake said. “My experience was that the older I was, the more my peers were. And I realized that they had to challenge more tolerance.”
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