Alphabet’s board of directors is investigating how executives handled claims of sexual harassment and other misconduct — including the actions of Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who has been accused of having relationships with employees.
An independent subcommittee has reportedly been formed to address the issues and the board has hired an outside law firm as well, according to CNBC. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
The $90 million payment to former Google executive Andy Rubin — after an internal probe found sexual assault allegations against him to be credible — sparked a wave of protests at the tech giant that began with 20,000 employees walking out worldwide last November.
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A Google employee holds a sign during a walkout to protest how the tech giant handled sexual misconduct at Jackson Square Park in New York, U.S., Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018.
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Jennifer Blakely, a former Google manager who wrote an essay in August for Medium describing an affair with Drummond, who was married at the time, painted an unflattering picture of a man who didn’t think twice about violating Google’s policy against dating subordinates.
“David was well aware that our relationship was in violation of Google’s new policy which went from ‘discouraging’ direct-reporting-line relationships to outright banning them,” she wrote.
Drummond, who received $47 million in salary and equity last year according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, is the latest American tech executive to be called out in the #MeToo era.
Drummond released the following statement to news outlets when Blakely’s blog post was published.
David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer at Google Inc., at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California on March 11, 2011.
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“Her account raises many claims about us and other people, including our son and my former wife,” he said. “As you would expect, there are two sides to all of the conversations and details Jennifer recounts, and I take a very different view about what happened. I have discussed these claims directly with Jennifer, and I addressed the details of our relationship with our employer at the time. … Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.”
Fox News reached out to Google for comment on this story.
