Meta received a authorized victory on Wednesday in opposition to a former worker who printed an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator briefly prohibited the creator from selling or additional distributing copies.
Sarah Wynn-Williams final week launched “Careless Folks: A Cautionary Story of Energy, Greed, and Misplaced Idealism,” a guide that describes a collection of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and different inappropriate conduct by senior executives throughout her tenure on the firm. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the guide is prohibited beneath 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 offered sufficient grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had doubtlessly violated her contract, in response to a authorized submitting posted by Meta. The 2 events will now start personal arbitration.
Along with halting guide promotions and gross sales, Ms. Wynn-Williams should chorus from partaking in or “amplifying any additional disparaging, important or in any other case detrimental feedback,” in response to the submitting. She additionally should retract all earlier disparaging feedback “to the extent inside her management.”
The submitting didn’t seem to restrict the writer, Flatiron Books, or its mum or dad firm, Macmillan, from persevering with publication of the memoir.
Meta has vehemently denied the allegations within the guide.
The guide is a “mixture of out-of-date and beforehand reported claims concerning the firm and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, mentioned in an announcement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for trigger, he added, and an investigation on the time decided that “she made deceptive and unfounded allegations of harassment.”
A spokeswoman for Flatiron Books didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. A spokesman for Ms. Wynn-Williams, who labored at what was then known as Fb from 2011 to 2018, didn’t remark.
The transfer to publish the arbitration submitting is one in every of 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 20 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 guide 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 employees from making doubtlessly 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 mentioned that it didn’t require workers “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 mentioned it might now not drive workers to settle sexual harassment claims in personal arbitration, following the same stance taken by Google on the time.
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.
