Ex-Facebook Whistleblower Accuses Meta’s Global Affairs Chief of Sexual Harassment: Report

A former public policy official at Facebook is accusing a top executive, Joel Kaplan, of a pattern of sexual harassment that, the employee alleges in a forthcoming book, went unchecked by the social networking giant.

According to NBC News, Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams, alleges in the book, out tomorrow, that she was terminated for raising concerns about Kaplan. In the book, titled Careless People, Wynn-Williams describes a series of inappropriate comments that Kaplan allegedly made during her six years at the company, including asking whether her U.S. citizenship test asked a question about the meaning of the sexual term “dirty Sanchez.” After Wynn-Williams gave birth, she further alleges that Kaplan asked where she was “bleeding from.”

In a statement to Vanity Fair, a Meta spokesperson called the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.” (Vanity Fair has requested comment from Kaplan through a Meta spokesperson.) While Meta confirmed it did conduct a sexual harassment investigation, which it says stretched 42 days and included interviews with 17 subjects, the company told NBC News that he was cleared in 2017.

Wynn-Williams was fired from Meta that same year. Meta’s spokesperson said her termination was the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”

Kaplan was named Meta’s chief global affairs officer in January, replacing predecessor Nick Clegg, who held the position during the Biden administration. Kaplan was a former senior advisor to the George W. Bush White House. He previously faced backlash inside Facebook when he turned out to support his friend, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during his confirmation hearings, as Kavanaugh faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct, which the justice has denied. Kaplan was also reportedly among the architects of Meta’s plan to roll back the company’s hate speech and diversity, equity and inclusion policies just before Trump took office.

But while some of the most explosive allegations in the book are targeted at Kaplan, Wynn-Williams takes aim at CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as well, describing a culture of “lethal carelessness” that she says made Facebook a vector for global instability.

In particular, she writes about Facebook’s attempts to expand into China. In congressional testimony, Zuckerberg has said the company walked away from the opportunity because it “could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.” But in the book, Wynn-Williams describes a lengthy effort by Facebook to appease Chinese censors. According to the Washington Post, Wynn-Williams has filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that the company “stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information” to investors and regulators on the topic.

In a statement to the Post, a Meta spokesperson also dismissed the complaint as old news. “This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.”

Wynn-Williams’ book is but the latest entry in the Facebook whistleblower canon, a genre that also includes the series of allegations brought forward by former staffer Frances Haugen as part of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series in 2021. At the time, both political parties were keen to beat up on Big Tech, and Facebook executives were repeatedly dragged to Capitol Hill to answer for Haugen’s claims that Facebook’s algorithm was, among other things, harming teen girls.

But Wynn-Williams book comes out a radically different time for the company now known as Meta. It is enjoying a cozier relationship with Republicans, while its executives have terminated programs designed to create a more hospitable working environment for women and underrepresented groups. Zuckerberg himself has called for more “masculine energy” in the workplace.