End of the year maybe?
nothing new, but
Bobby Kotick, the longtime chief executive of videogame giant Activision Blizzard Inc., received a troubling email in July 2018.
A lawyer for a former employee at Sledgehammer Games, an Activision-owned studio, alleged in the email that her client had been raped in 2016 and 2017 by her male supervisor after she had been pressured to consume too much alcohol in the office and at work events.
The female employee reported the incidents to Sledgehammer’s human-resources department and other supervisors, but nothing happened, according to the email, which threatened a lawsuit against the company.
Within months of receiving the email, said people familiar with the situation, Activision reached an out-of-court settlement with the woman, who also had reported one of the incidents to the police. Mr. Kotick didn’t inform the company’s board of directors about the alleged rapes or the settlement, said people with knowledge of the board.
Activision has been thrown into turmoil in recent months by multiple regulatory investigations into alleged sexual assaults and mistreatment of female employees dating back years. Mr. Kotick has told directors and other executives he wasn’t aware of many of the allegations of misconduct, and he has played down others, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents.
Those documents, which include memos, emails and regulatory requests, and interviews with former employees and others familiar with the company, however, cast Mr. Kotick’s response in a different light. They show that he knew about allegations of employee misconduct in many parts of the company. He didn’t inform the board of directors about everything he knew, the interviews and documents show, even after regulators began investigating the incidents in 2018. Some departing employees who were accused of misconduct were praised on the way out, while their co-workers were asked to remain silent about the matters.
Mr. Kotick has been subpoenaed in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into how the company handled reports of misconduct and disclosed them to the public, The Wall Street Journal reported in September. What Mr. Kotick knew about the alleged incidents, and what he told other employees, the board of directors and investors, is part of that probe.