One of Meta’s earliest employees is suing the company for sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and retaliation, according to a lawsuit filed this week in the state of Washington.
Kelly Stonelake, who spent 15 years at the company and rose to the rank of director, alleges in the lawsuit she faced a cycle of gender-based discrimination and harassment that persisted from shortly after her hiring in 2009 to when she was laid off in January 2024.
She alleges in the suit that Meta failed to take action after she reported sexual harassment and assault; retaliated against her after she flagged a video game product as racist and potentially harmful to minors; and was routinely passed over for promotions in favor of men on her team.
By the time she was laid off, Stonelake states in the suit she was on extended medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder. Her mental state was so severely damaged from working under alleged discriminatory conditions at Meta that she is still receiving medical treatment, according to the lawsuit filed in the King County Superior Court in Washington.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton declined to comment citing pending litigation.
The lawsuit comes as Meta and founder Mark Zuckerberg undergo an evolution that appears to be shifting to the political right. Zuckerberg sat behind President Trump at his inauguration, put UFC boss Dana White — a friend, donor, and supporter of Trump — on Meta’s board, and has started hiring public policy staff from politically right-leaning news outlets.
Meta also eliminated third-party fact-checking and halted its biggest diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — actions that are in line with Trump’s policies. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to lament that companies needed “masculine energy” because too much “feminine energy” had “neutered” the workplace. As of 2023, around 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs were men.
Speaking alongside her lawyer, Stonelake told TechCrunch that the events described in her lawsuit illustrate a larger pattern of abuse at Meta.
“I decided to file the lawsuit when it became clear that was the best, if not the only, way to drive accountability at Meta,” she told TechCrunch. “Meta has the opportunity to do harm on a scale that only tech companies can.”
“It was supposed to be the place where we let off steam”
Stonelake started working at Facebook in 2009, at a time when the “like” button and “tagging” friends in status updates were still brand-new innovations. The company wasn’t public yet, nor had it been dramatized on the big screen in “The Social Network.”
She worked at the Palo Alto office, alongside men who were decades her senior, on building opportunities for businesses to use Facebook, she told TechCrunch, and according to her legal complaint.
In her lawsuit, she alleges that the sexual harassment started almost immediately.
During her first few weeks of employment, Stonelake alleges in the suit that a colleague grabbed her crotch while at a company social gathering called “League.”
League was a popular event for employees to commune with others amid their long, demanding working hours. Top-ranking employees like Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg attended, Stonelake said.
“I played beer pong with Sheryl [Sandberg] regularly,” Stonelake told TechCrunch. “It was supposed to be the space where we let off steam because everyone was working so hard.”
Through a representative, Sandberg declined to comment.
Stonelake recalled jumping back in shock when her colleague grabbed her without her consent, but she was apprehensive about reporting the incident to Meta’s human resources department.
“I think that’s a pretty common experience for women and especially young women,” Stonelake said. “That’s based in large part on experiences of reporting these incidents and not going anywhere.”
Stonelake stayed at the company. She told TechCrunch she was enamored with Zuckerberg’s vision for a more connected world. But Stonelake alleges she soon experienced sexual harassment from her manager.
During a business trip in 2011, Stonelake alleges in the lawsuit, her manager took her out to dinner, then escorted her to her hotel room, where he attempted to force himself on her, putting his hands down her pants. In the lawsuit, Stonelake says this same manager later told her she would not receive a promotion unless she slept with him. When she declined, she was not promoted.
Harassment from her manager continued, she alleges, and Stonelake transferred to Seattle from the Palo Alto office in 2012. Before she transferred, she reported her manager for harassment, yet no actions were taken and he stayed at the company for years without consequence, the lawsuit alleges.
Once Stonelake relocated to Seattle, she steadily rose through management until she reached the director level in 2017. In this new role, Stonelake alleges her manager harassed and discriminated against her, perpetuating the cycle she thought she escaped years earlier.
Stonelake details in the suit that during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020, she confronted her manager because he changed his Facebook profile picture to a Blue Lives Matter symbol, which is commonly seen as a rebuttal to BLM. According to the suit, she told him about how the picture could be received by their diverse team, as Meta considers employees’ personal Facebook pages to be reflective of the company.
“We’re explicitly told that our personal Facebook pages are important to consider as senior leaders of the company,” Stonelake told TechCrunch.
Stonelake’s manager responded to her by saying, “Black boys start out innocent, and between then and when they got [sic] shot by police, they’re getting into gangs and getting into crime, and the real issues are with social services and education,” the suit alleges.
Stonelake went to Meta’s human resources, but alleges she received no support. The suit claims Stonelake was twice passed over for promotions, while her male colleagues were promoted.
“We didn’t have a plan for how we would keep people safe”
Stonelake transferred to Meta’s Reality Labs in 2022 to lead product marketing for the virtual reality social network, Horizon Worlds. She told TechCrunch that she was excited to work on such a central product in Zuckerberg’s imagined metaverse.
Stonelake says she led “go-to-market” strategies to bring Horizon Worlds to broader audiences, opening access to teenagers, international markets, and mobile device users.
But as a leader in this product rollout, Stonelake raised concerns that Horizon Worlds did not have adequate safety systems to keep underage users off the platform; she also alleges in the suit that she flagged patterns of racist behavior on the app, which proliferated due to a lack of robust content moderation tools.
“The leadership team was aware that in one test, it took an average of 34 seconds of entering the platform before users with Black avatars were called racial slurs including the ‘N-word’ and ‘monkey,’” the suit alleges.
“We were rapidly expanding, and we didn’t have a plan for how we would keep people safe,” Stonelake told TechCrunch.
Stonelake says she was excluded from weekly leadership meetings after she raised these concerns. Then, according to the suit, Stonelake was denied another promotion in January 2023.
Afterward, she went on emergency medical leave to receive treatments for suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the suit. Stonelake was informed that she would be let go in January 2024 as part of mass layoffs at Meta.
Looking back at her time at Meta, Stonelake still remembers the joy of watching Zuckerberg march alongside LGBTQ+ employees and allies during San Francisco’s Pride festivities in 2013. She said she felt invigorated by Zuckerberg’s commencement address at Harvard in 2017 when he declared: “Every generation expands the circle of people we consider ‘one of us.’ For us, it now encompasses the entire world.”
Now, Stonelake says, she realizes those actions may have been performative.
“I thought that as I got more and more senior… I would only be able to protect more people to change the culture,” said Stonelake. “My experience was that the more senior I got, so did my peers, and I noticed that the more senior men were, the less tolerance they had to be challenged.”
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