Meta gained a authorized victory on Wednesday in opposition to a former worker who printed an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator briefly prohibited the writer from selling or additional distributing copies.
Sarah Wynn-Williams final week launched “Careless Folks: A Cautionary Story of Energy, Greed, and Misplaced Idealism,” a ebook that describes a sequence of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and different inappropriate habits by senior executives throughout her tenure on the firm. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the ebook is prohibited underneath a nondisparagement contract she signed as a world affairs worker.
Throughout an emergency listening to on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, discovered that Meta had supplied sufficient grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had probably violated her contract, based on a authorized submitting posted by Meta. The 2 events will now start personal arbitration.
Along with halting ebook promotions and gross sales, Ms. Wynn-Williams should chorus from participating in or “amplifying any additional disparaging, crucial or in any other case detrimental feedback,” based on the submitting. She additionally should retract all earlier disparaging feedback “to the extent inside her management.”
The submitting doesn’t restrict the writer, Flatiron Books, or its dad or mum firm, Macmillan, from persevering with publication of the memoir, a spokeswoman for Macmillan stated, including that the corporate will proceed to advertise the ebook.
“We’re appalled by Meta’s techniques to silence our writer via the usage of a nondisparagement clause in a severance settlement,” the spokeswoman, Marlena Bittner, stated. “The ebook went via a radical enhancing and vetting course of, and we stay dedicated to publishing vital books comparable to this.”
Meta has vehemently denied the allegations within the ebook.
The ebook is a “mixture of out-of-date and beforehand reported claims in regards to the firm and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, stated in an announcement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for poor efficiency, he added, and an investigation on the time decided that “she made deceptive and unfounded allegations of harassment.”
A spokesman for Ms. Wynn-Williams, who labored at what was then known as Fb from 2011 to 2017, didn’t remark.
The transfer to publish the arbitration submitting is one among Meta’s most forceful public repudiations of a former worker’s tell-all memoir, a number of of which have been printed over the previous twenty years.
Meta executives have additionally responded on-line to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s claims, calling most of them wildly exaggerated or flat-out false.
It’s unclear whether or not Meta’s makes an attempt to claw again Ms. Wynn-Williams’s ebook will in the end achieve success. In 2023, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board dominated that it’s usually unlawful for firms to supply severance agreements that prohibit staff from making probably disparaging statements about former employers, together with discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.
In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the corporate’s board of administrators stated that it didn’t require staff “to stay silent about harassment or discrimination,” and that the corporate “strictly prohibits retaliation in opposition to any personnel” for talking up on these points.
And in 2018, Meta stated it will now not drive staff to settle sexual harassment claims in personal arbitration, following an identical stance taken by Google on the time.
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.
