Meta has won an effort to temporarily stop one of its former employees from promoting a tell-all book about the company, which The New York Times described as “an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world” filled with salacious details about its top leaders.
The continued promotion of “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Meta’s former director of global public policy, would cause the company to suffer “immediate and irreparable loss,” according to the emergency arbitration ruling handed down by the American Arbitration Association’s Nicholas Gowen.
The ruling also orders Wynn-Williams to do what she can to stop further publication of the book, although the ruling did not impose any demands on the book’s publisher, Macmillan. It concludes that Meta, which was known as Facebook when Wynn-Williams worked there, would be likely to win its case claiming she violated a non-disparagement clause.
In a statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone interpreted the ruling as affirming the company’s claim that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
“This urgent legal action was made necessary by [Wynn-Williams], who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years,” Stone added.
The book has already been reviewed in the Times and featured in other major publications this week. Meta’s aggressive efforts to suppress the book, some have pointed out, are likely to amount to better publicity than Wynn-Williams could ever dream of buying.
The allegations about Meta in the book, ranging from sexual harassment to human rights failures, are highly damning.
In one portion of the book, Wynn-Williams says Meta retaliated against her after she reported sexual harassment by her boss, Joel Kaplan, who was vice president for global public policy at the time. He’s now the chief global affairs officer and appears as the public face of Meta around the world. Kaplan, she writes, asked her after she gave birth, “Where are you bleeding from?” and told her she looked “sultry” at a company event.
She also writes that Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, insisted to her once that they share a bed on a private jet in 2016. She also alleges that Sandberg once instructed her assistant to buy lingerie for Wynn-Williams and herself.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of several tech tycoons who have cozied up to President Donald Trump in recent months, appears as an embarrassing figure in the book, according to reviews.
Wynn-Williams writes that he refused to admit that his employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan, expressed admiration for notorious slavery advocate President Andrew Jackson, and vocalized his desire to have a “tribe” of children. She also alleges that Chinese President Xi Jinping turned down Zuckerberg’s request that he name his unborn child.
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Wynn-Williams also alleges that Facebook knowingly allowed hateful lies to spread on its platforms in Myanmar, inciting a genocide against the minority Rohingya ethnic group.
She told NBC News this week that she filed a whistleblower complaint last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission arguing that Meta misled its investors.
Neither Macmillan nor Wynn-Williams responded to requests for comment.