Meta lays off employee who worked for 15 years. She sues it for sexual assaults, denied promotions

The lawsuit comes at a time when Meta is already facing backlash from employees claiming they have been laid off not because of their poor performance as the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed, but because they took leaves.

A Meta employee who was laid off last January has filed a case against the tech giant for sexual assaults and denied promotions. Kelly Stonelake has also alleged that her managers stonewalled her managers when she raised concerns about the safety of minors using Meta’s Horizon products, Fortune reported.

Stonelake, 37, was a midlevel creative director, and working with Meta was a dream come true for her until she began to see the dark side of corporate culture at Facebook. In her lawsuit, she described a series of alleged events over her 15-year career at the company that culminated in her getting laid off when she was in a yearlong emergency mental health break. Stonelake said that she “was ultimately laid off due to extended medical leave.” Her last day as a Meta employee was January 8, 2024.

Describing one dark incident, Stonelake wrote in her complaint that at a "party with a group of colleagues, a male executive in her management chain said drunkenly, ‘Hey Kelly, what would your husband say if you called him right now and said that you f####d me?’”

Her lawsuit also quotes glowing performance reviews and is accompanied by screenshots of hostile messages from her male colleagues. For years, Stonelake said, she felt she needed to change herself to thrive at Meta especially because it was her dream job. She added that she was discriminated against repeatedly, and every time she kept asking, “‘What can I do? What could it have been about me?’”

Stonelake's lawsuit comes at a time when the tech giant is already facing backlash from employees claiming they have been laid off not because of their poor performance as the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed, but because they took leaves.

Also, Zuckerberg had spoken in favor of encouraging "masculine energy" at workplaces, adding that it’s good if a culture “celebrates the aggression a bit more.”

“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” he said in a recent podcast with host Joe Rogan. The remarks were made just weeks before Meta laid off 3,600 employees for what Zuckerberg termed “low performance.”

Meta declined to comment on Stonelake's allegations, citing ongoing litigation.