The DFEH just expanded their lawsuit against Activison Blizzard, and they’re bringing some pretty hefty new charges and expanding who the lawsuit represents.
For those out of the loop on this, here's a bit of a summary.
Back in late July, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Activision Bizzard alleging widespread workplace discrimination and sexual harassment against female employees.
Acti/Blizz initially denied the accusations, but the overwhelming amount of reports from inside the company, the implicit admission and explicit apology by former Blizzard President J. Allen Brack (who subsequently resigned, possibly at the demand of his superiors), and the DFEH’s reputation lends a ton of credibility to this lawsuit.
We’ve already hashed most of this out in other threads (links 1, 2, 3, 4), though, and I don’t care to dredge all that back up any further. This thread is about the new update in the case.
The DFEH has just expanded their lawsuit, and it ain’t pretty.
The DFEH is alleging that Acti/Blizz has been intentionally interfering with their investigation using a combination of what effectively amounts to destruction of evidence and witness tampering.
Specifically, the DFEH is accusing Acti/Blizz of:
Destroying (exact wording used was “shredding”) documents detailing sexual harassment reports the company had received in the past. These were allegedly destroyed specifically to prevent the DFEH from obtaining them for use in the lawsuit, which is blatantly illegal.
Hiring WilmerHale, a third-party law firm with history of union busting and ties to Amazon, to intimidate employees and disrupt their efforts to organize and communicate with each other and outside parties. According to Acti/Blizz, WilmerHale is there, “to conduct a review of our policies and procedures.”
Pressuring employees into NDAs (Non-Disclosure/Disparagement Agreements), which forces them to get explicit approval from the company before they can talk to DFEH investigators, or really say anything bad about the company in general with regard to sexual harassment or discrimination. Employees who violate these agreements could face “severe penalties.” This is likely part of WilmerHale’s influence.
Additionally, the lawsuit has been expanded to include contract workers, a group that is typically marginalized due to the nature of their employment almost always being short-term. This part isn’t really a major bombshell like the above DFEH accusations, but it’s still worth mentioning.
Destroying or tampering with evidence and intimidating or dissuading witnesses can be charged as felonies, btw. If these allegations are true, this could land Acti/Blizz in even more hot water.
Yes I read this too and it’s not surprising based on the information I got from you why JAB got fired, but it’s proves your point that his leave is forced by the company, because his actions contradicts what the real bosses attempted to do.
The whole case is maybe the real storm this company needs to wake up, but this will be a long long battle.
Forum Mod Edit: This post has been edited by a moderator due to masked language as it is in violation of the Code of Conduct.
the company has been slowly going into the deep looong night sleep many years ago. imo, there isnt much to hope for at this point, because those that are currently in extremely high position, their value isnt really align with the original blizzards’ value.
The Overwatch Team is renaming the Character McCree because it was named after a real employee that is now charged for allegedly sexually assaulting female colleagues.
I just saw this in one of Azmongold clips. They should never have done that. Also there are rumers about Blizzard might shut down and renamed to Insight instead.
This is the DUMBEST thing anyone could do. They renaming FICTIONAL character because of some guy being bad IRL. It’s like renaming your character just because they were named after some serial killer (they are far worse than “sexual predators”). And i won’t be impressed if his new name will be done to please inclusivity, because his new name can’t be cooler than McCree anyway.
I’d say I hope karma is finally catching up with Blizzard buuut… the world is unjust and sucks in general so it won’t be surprising if Blizzard somehow gets out of this without taking less damage than it deserves.
The only bad thing about Blizzard being burned to the ground is losing HotS. And I guess also D3 which is literally the only Diablo-like game (as weird as it may sound referring to an actual Diablo game) that I played and didn’t get bored to death. Yes, Path of Exile bored me to death. No, I didn’t play Diablo 2.
This is exactly how I feel as well. It’s like you’re deleting established history for the sake of promoting a toxic agenda the majority of regular gamers simply do not care about and just want to play games.
Worth noting that most of these things are allegations at this point. Regarding the NDAs, if true, is really nice though. Giving free circumstantial evidence against the client is probably one of the stupidest things a law firm can do.
Quoting from Wikipedia
In some cases, employees who are dismissed following their complaints about unacceptable practices (whistleblowers), or discrimination against and harassment of themselves, may be paid compensation subject to an NDA forbidding them from disclosing the events complained about. Such conditions in an NDA may not be enforceable in law, although they may intimidate the former employee into silence.
And more importantly.
Like all contracts, they cannot be enforced if the contracted activities are illegal.
So unless your plan is to argue sexual harassment was part of the job description and mutually agreed upon, good luck trying to make this not look worse than it currently does because those flimsy pieces paper are not going to hold in court.
It still doesn’t top ESPN removing a commentator for having the name Robert Lee from a program during the time when idgets were tearing down historical statues. The guy was of Asian decent…
How D3 kept you entertained more than PoE is…sad. And the fact you never played D2 explains a lot if you think D3 is even worth playing. D3 is a close your eyes and pretend there is anything compelling while you steamroll content fiesta through compared to either of those games. I got bored with D3 after a few playthroughs on Torment HC when I started. Never looked back Paragon shared levels shared? LMAO, same items with 3 more dex ooohhhhh so fun…This game is the one that revealed the beginning of the end for design in this company. Saddens me that anyone thinks this game has anything of worth.
Non-disclosure agreements are common throughout the corporate world (and beyond, for that matter); this was likely taking place for years before Wilmer Hale’s services were retained.
The devil is in the details… more specifically, the timeline. The company can only be held liable for destroying documents that it was 1) required to hold onto due to the nature of the suit, or 2) otherwise required to retain by law (tax and pay info, etc).
That said, if it can be shown that documents were destroyed after the lawsuit was issued… yeah, that’s trouble.
Allegation seems to be a key-word that people are ignoring. So much for invoking the 5th amendment. I get it that the real victims deserve the justice, but they’re likely to be compensated big cash if found to be true. What the victims didn’t need was compensation + destroying Blizzards rep, fan-base, getting top quality Devs fired and their reputation ruined and affecting us, the player-base.
Imagine getting your life ruined over a txt message. I bet if we see most of the community’s txt messages on their apps or ingame, they wouldn’t be so innocent at all themselves. The toxicity, flaming and swearing would be found in their messages. The average group message of anyone would make Jesse Mcree’s chat look like they were in pre-school. They might as well change Mcree’s name to McDougal coz their chat log is hilarious compared to the HOTS/wc3 chat I normally see.
The cancel culture takes things too far and instead of dealing it with the people responsible and compensating the victim, they create more victims such as the Devs fired and the player-base like us. Instead they drag us in to their political warfare over-shadowing the victims.
If Blizzard was a person, this is what defamation would look like in real time. Until the JUDGE slams the hammer and issues the sentence and verdicts, then people should be refraining from further damaging Blizzard. What if the allegations and investigations weren’t as bad as they turned out to be, or Blizzard had proof they were going by the law and books? But they ended up getting damaged this badly anyway and can’t undo anything.
If the judge and verdict finds them guilty beyond reasonable of a doubt, then we (the Player-base) can decide if we can continue playing the games instead of it being shaped or influenced by hear-say and 3rd party intel. Atm they make the allegations sound like it’s stamped true. Most people are getting their “inside info” from kotaku journalists, google update news (like me), or youtubers like asmogold like it’s a source.
they shouldn’t rename mcree
its been so long now, the character is mcree
i honestly don’t care about the drama, but mcree will always be mcree!
i saw someone throwing around the term “sex offender” in relation to Mcree which just makes me realise how doomed the world is.
However if it is done by a professional law firm, as mentioned, then it is pretty much lawyers fighting lawyers. They will not have taken such action unless they are fairly certain of a good outcome. Most of the charges will likely amount to nothing other than bad publicity.