Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

Mike Isaac, Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir, NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2025.

Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.

Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.

However:

The filing does not limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir, a spokeswoman for Macmillan said, adding that the company will continue to promote the book.

“We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a nondisparagement clause in a severance agreement,” the spokeswoman, Marlena Bittner, said. “The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this.”

There's more at the link. 

As Beth Collier noted in a post to LinkedIn: “Will anyone be surprised that a company that started by ranking college women’s appearances may have had a toxic culture for women?”

See my post about the NYTimes review of the book.