Meta’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, is now facing an “internal audit” of the company after pressuring the British tabloid Daily Mail to end a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick .
The revelations come in an explosive new report from The Wall Street Journal, which details a coordinated campaign to stop the tabloid from publishing the story and drain resources from Activision Blizzard and Meta.
Sandberg dated Kotick from 2016 to 2019, who is now accused of encouraging a culture of sexual harassment and discrimination at his company. Though he denied he was aware of any troubling allegations of employee misconduct, including alleged rape, Kotick appeared to be aware of many incidents — a fact he has concealed from the company’s board of directors.
The Wall Street Journal report details how Sandberg contacted the Daily Mail’s digital department in 2016 and again in 2019 as the tabloid worked to uncover a restraining order against Kotick that a former girlfriend had issued in 2014. Sandberg and Kotick reportedly devised “a strategy to persuade the Daily Mail not to report on the restraining order,” working with employees of their respective companies.
In both cases, Sandberg reportedly told the tabloid that Kotick’s former girlfriend had withdrawn the allegations of molestation, which prompted her to seek a restraining order.
According to the WSJ report, Meta is now investigating her COO’s involvement in trying to end the story about her then-boyfriend. When TechCrunch asked if Sandberg had violated company policy by using internal PR resources for a personal dispute, Meta declined to answer.
“Sheryl Sandberg has never threatened MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook to influence an editorial decision,” said Mao-Lin Shen, spokesman for Meta Executive Communications, in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. “This story tries to make connections that don’t exist.”
For a company weary of an unrelenting string of scandals, revelations about Sandberg’s meddling in her ex-boyfriend’s PR crisis are just another problem. It’s not clear how seriously Meta is scrutinizing her behavior — or if the broader leadership team was even aware of it, though the WSJ does indicate her actions are “vetted” for possible violations of company rules.
After years of tension and high-stakes policymaking during the Trump years, Sandberg is reportedly not as close to Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg as he once was. It’s possible that the Kotick situation will be seen as yet another misstep, with Sandberg making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Internally, Sandberg is known for using Meta’s PR resources to defend her personal brand, although it’s not yet known to what extent Meta’s COO worked in lockstep with the rest of the company’s leadership in the Kotick situation.
Kotick is hanging by a thread
In a statement to TechCrunch, Activision Blizzard’s board of directors said that Kotick notified the board’s senior independent director of the “incident” in 2014 and later the entire board. After an investigation by the law firm Skadden Arps, the board found that “the allegations were unfounded”.
A spokesman for Activision Blizzard referred TechCrunch to Elizabeth McCloskey of the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters, who produced testimony from Kotick’s former girlfriend, whose name the firm declined to identify, and retracted her previous allegations against Kotick.
“…In 2014 I signed an affidavit clarifying that what I said is not true,” Kotick’s former girlfriend’s testimony, obtained through the law firm, read. In the statement, she also accused the WSJ of “exploiting” her to publish an unflattering story about Kotick.
Activision Blizzard employees staged a strike and circulated a petition to call for Kotick’s resignation in November amid his involvement in the company’s ongoing culture crisis. Kotick has held on as CEO so far, but reports say he won’t retain the position on the other side of Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion takeover of the company.
Activision Blizzard added two new women to its board of directors on Thursday, although the company told TechCrunch that the timing of the announcement was unrelated to any new revelations surrounding Kotick. These board members are Lulu Cheng Meservey, Vice President of Substack Communications, formerly of TrailRunner, and Kerry Carr, a Bacardi SVP.
The two new board members replace two men resigning from the board. As Bloomberg noted, the additions will bring Activision Blizzard’s board of directors into compliance with California law, which requires that the board of directors of a public company with six or more directors must include at least three women or face hefty fines.
Kotick himself will soon leave the board of Coca-Cola, where he served in a well-paid role for a decade. The company has been pressured by some investors to remove Kotick amid the unfolding culture scandal at Activision Blizzard, though the gaming exec says he will step down to focus on growing his company through its acquisition by Microsoft respectively.
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