Meta received a authorized victory on Wednesday in opposition to a former worker who printed an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator quickly prohibited the writer from selling or additional distributing copies.
Sarah Wynn-Williams final week launched “Careless People: A Cautionary Story of Energy, Greed, and Misplaced Idealism,” a guide that describes a sequence 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 underneath a nondisparagement contract she signed as a worldwide 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, in response to a authorized submitting posted by Meta. The 2 events will now start non-public 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 doesn’t restrict the writer, Flatiron Books, or its mother or father firm, Macmillan, from persevering with publication of the memoir, a spokeswoman for Macmillan mentioned, including that the corporate will proceed to advertise the guide.
“We’re appalled by Meta’s techniques to silence our writer by the usage of a nondisparagement clause in a severance settlement,” the spokeswoman, Marlena Bittner, mentioned. “The guide went by an intensive enhancing and vetting course of, and we stay dedicated to publishing vital books equivalent to this.”
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The guide is a “mixture of out-of-date and beforehand reported claims concerning the firm and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, mentioned in a press release. 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 considered one 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 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 guide will finally achieve success. In 2023, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board dominated that it’s typically unlawful for corporations 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 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 could no longer force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in non-public arbitration, following the same stance taken by Google on the time.
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.
