A top Senate Republican is pressing Meta for details on its handling of sexual harassment allegations going back more than a decade.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to the company on Tuesday asking about allegations made public in March that one of its executives, Joel Kaplan, sent sexually harassing emails to an employee in 2015 and 2016. The letter also asked for information about any other substantiated allegations of sexual harassment or workplace misconduct against “company leadership” since 2010 and for materials related to Meta’s workplace training.
Later Tuesday, Meta responded to Grassley by letter and said it planned to turn over an internal report that, according to the company, cleared Kaplan of wrongdoing in 2017. Meta said it investigated the allegations against Kaplan and found them to be “entirely without merit.”
Heidi Swartz, Meta’s vice president of employment law and investigations, also offered in the letter to meet with Grassley’s staff.
Grassley’s review of the matter appears to be in an early stage, and it’s part of a broader set of questions the senator has been asking about how Meta is complying with federal laws that protect whistleblowers.
Grassley’s questions are part of the fallout from a bestselling memoir, “Careless People,” by former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams. The book chronicles her six-plus years handling international affairs for the social media giant, a job that gave her direct contact with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other C-suite executives.
In the book, Wynn-Williams, a lawyer and former New Zealand diplomat, blames the company for upending politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. She also makes allegations against Kaplan, who was her boss, and writes that she faced retaliation and was fired in 2017 after she reported Kaplan internally.
A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday that the senator was “reviewing the allegations Wynn-Williams brought before his committee to try to determine their veracity,” and is also reviewing Meta’s response.
“Cooperation from both Meta and Wynn-Williams is essential as his office works to determine the fact pattern surrounding Wynn-Williams’ allegations,” the spokesperson said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. (J. Scott Applewhite / AP file)
Meta has pushed back on Wynn-Williams’ allegations, saying that she was fired for performance reasons and is unreliable.
“Ms. Wynn-Williams brought her allegations only after it had been made clear to her that her ongoing and well-documented performance issues could no longer be ignored,” Swartz, the Meta lawyer, wrote in her response to Grassley.
Swartz added that “Ms. Wynn-Williams is the sole person to have made such an allegation about Mr. Kaplan during his 14 years working at the company.” And she accused Wynn-Williams of being a frequent “instigator” of off-color jokes during her time at the company.
In March, Meta won an arbitration order saying Wynn-Williams had violated a nondisparagement clause in her severance agreement. That has prevented her from promoting but not from releasing the memoir, which has spent several weeks on The New York Times’ list of top-selling nonfiction.
Grassley, who has a long record of advocacy for whistleblower protections in the Senate, has expressed concern about Meta’s treatment of Wynn-Williams as a whistleblower. Last month, he wrote to Zuckerberg with concerns that Meta was “bullying” Wynn-Williams into staying silent. Meta says there is no restriction on Wynn-Williams speaking with investigators.
Last month, Wynn-Williams testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, where lawmakers of both parties expressed deep anger at the company on a variety of subjects. Many senators focused on the company’s yearslong quest to break into the Chinese market, where its apps Facebook and Instagram are banned, and the privacy compromises Meta considered before abandoning the effort in 2019.
Ravi Naik, a lawyer for Wynn-Williams, said that Wynn-Williams welcomes Grassley’s inquiry.
“My client appreciates the seriousness with which Chairman Grassley and his Senate colleagues are investigating these issues,” Naik said in a statement. “Despite Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s claims of being free speech champions, they continue to silence my client, a whistleblower who stepped forward to report wrongful and illegal activity by the company that threatened the safety of its users, U.S. national security, and its employees.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former director of global public policy, is sworn in to testify on Capitol Hill, on April 9. (Mark Schiefelbein / AP file)
In Grassley’s letter to Meta, he quoted three emails from Kaplan to Wynn-Williams, all three of which Wynn-Williams also quoted in her memoir. In one from 2016, Kaplan asked whether her U.S. citizenship test included the phrase “dirty sanchez,” a sexual slang phrase and racial slur. In a second email from 2015, after Kaplan secured funding for a new position on her team, he emailed, “Who is your sugar daddy?” And in a third from 2015, he promised that if she met a budget goal, he would “personally buy you ‘something nice’ (niceness TBD by the beholder/buyer).”
Grassley wrote: “I take very seriously allegations of whistleblower retaliation and sexual misconduct.”
At the time of the emails, Kaplan was Wynn-Williams’ boss and a vice president for global public policy. Wynn-Williams wrote in her memoir that she considered the 2015 emails “pretty mild” but that the “dirty sanchez” question was a “new low,” “totally inappropriate” and a sign that his behavior was “getting worse.”
In January, Zuckerberg promoted Kaplan to chief global affairs officer, making him the head of all lobbying activity for the company. Her allegations became public in March, when Wynn-Williams spoke about them in an interview with NBC News ahead of the publication of her memoir.
Meta has not disputed the accuracy of the emails or commented on their contents. Kaplan has also not commented on the allegations, and did not respond to an email request for comment on Grassley’s letter. Some current and former Meta employees, including women, have said they had positive experiences working with and for Kaplan.
Swartz, the Meta lawyer, wrote to Grassley on Tuesday that the internal investigation of Kaplan did not cover his emails because, she wrote, Wynn-Williams did not raise the emails over the course of the investigation. Swartz wrote that she believed Wynn-Williams did not raise the emails at the time “because she was aware that she was commonly the instigator and had a track record of making off-color jokes and did not want to prompt an investigation into her own behavior.”
In her memoir, Wynn-Williams describes the investigation differently. She writes that Meta quickly closed out the internal review of Kaplan “before they’d received or reviewed all the documentation and information I said I would supply.”
Naik, the lawyer for Wynn-Williams, said in a statement: “The emails and documentation speak for themselves. My client testified under oath before the Senate about this harassment and will continue to stand by the truth.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com