While the fires of Activision Blizzard’s numerous sexual harassment and toxic workplace lawsuits haven’t yet receded, the soon-to-be subsidiary of Microsoft has come under fire for yet another lawsuit that restores the spotlight on the company’s “frat boy” culture.
Per Bloomberg, the new lawsuit has been filed by a senior employee referred to as “Jane Doe,” who detailed a number of incidents about her first few days after she joined the game conglomerate in 2017.
Apparently, the Activision leadership invited Doe to lunch on her first day, which they referred to as “initiation lunch,” and pressured her into drinking tequila shots. As if that weren’t uncouth and disrespectable enough, they then asked her to share “an embarrassing secret” with everyone as part of that initiation.
Doe further alleges that the company usually pressured its employees to imbibe alcohol and participate in “cube crawls,” where women were more often than not subjected to crude comments and groping. The employee also speaks of a game called “Jackbox,” played after work hours, which required the devs to come up with “creative answers” to sexual questions.
The lawsuit claims that when Doe protested this behavior to her supervisors, they warned her to keep these complaints to herself, lest they end up damaging the company’s image. But it’s been long since that ship sailed, hasn’t it?
After announcing the industry-shattering acquisition of Activision for a whopping $68.7 billion, Microsoft CEO of Gaming Phil Spencer promised that the Activision Blizzard leadership would now answer directly to him. But since the deal has yet to be finalized, Microsoft can’t quite influence the company, so Activision employees, regretfully, will have to tolerate this enabling behavior by their seniors for a little while longer.
