Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, Tell-All memoirs, because an arbitrator temporarily forbade the author from promoting or distributing copies.
Sarah Wynn-Williams released 'Careless People: A Courutionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism' last week, a book that describes a series of fire-making of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her term of office during her tenure at the company. Meta has pursued arbitration and with the argument that the book is forbidden under a non -dismissal contract that it signed as an employee of global matters.
During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, discovered that Meta had given enough grounds that Mrs. Wynn-Williams might have violated her contract, according to a legal application from Meta. The two parties will now start with private arbitration.
In addition to stopping book promotions and sales, Mrs. Wynn-Williams should not remember from entering into or “strengthening further contemptuous, critical or otherwise harmful comments,” according to the submission. She must also withdraw all earlier contemptuous comments “insofar as her control”.
The submission seemed like the publisher, Flatiron Books or her parent company, Macmillan, not to limit the continuous publication of the memoirs.
Meta has violently denied the allegations in the book.
The book is a “mix of outdated and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our managers,” said a meta-spokesperson, Andy Stone, in a statement. Mrs. Wynn-Williams was fired for the cause, he added, and an investigation at the time noted that “they made misleading and unfounded accusations of intimidation.”
A spokeswoman for Flatiron Books did not immediately respond to a request for comments. A spokesperson for Mrs. Wynn-Williams, who worked from 2011 to 2018 at what was then called Facebook, did not comment.
The switch to publish the arbitration application is one of the most powerful public rejections of Meta from the Tell-All memoirs of a former employee, some of which have been published over the past two decades.
Meta managers also responded online to the claims of Mrs. Wynn-Williams, who most of them call wild or stains incorrect.
It is unclear whether Meta's attempts to claw back Mrs. Wynn-Williams' book will eventually be successful. In 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer dismissal agreements that prohibit employees from making potentially contemporary statements about former employers, including discussing sexual intimidation or accusations of sexual attacks.
In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the company of the company said that it did not need employees to “remain silent about intimidation or discrimination,” and that the company “strictly opposed to any staff for speaking about these issues.
And in 2018, Meta said that employees would no longer force claims of sexual harassment in private arbitration, after a similar attitude of Google at that time.
Sheera Frenkel contributed reporting.
