Eight former SpaceX employees have filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, accusing the company’s founder of sexual harassment and retaliation.
“Musk knowingly and purposefully created an unwelcome hostile work environment based upon his conduct of interjecting into the workplace vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community,” wrote the employees in the Los Angeles lawsuit.
The group says Musk’s conduct fostered a “pervasively sexist culture” at SpaceX in which female engineers routinely dealt with harassment and sexist comments. The lawsuit says it was “common for engineers to apply crude and demeaning names to products in an attempt at humor, often at the expense of women and LGBTQ+ individuals.” One reported example of this was the name ‘Upskirt Camera’ for a camera on the Falcon Rocket, while another was a video including Musk and SpaceX president and CEO Gwynne Shotwell that “mocks and makes light of sexual misconduct and banter.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Musk’s many X (Twitter) posts including sexually explicit jokes only further contributed to a “perversely sexist culture at SpaceX.” The plaintiffs say they “experienced direct harassment that mimicked Musk’s posts.”
The group says they penned an open letter in 2022 detailing this allegedly problematic behaviour and were fired in retaliation. Bloomberg, who first covered the lawsuit, even reports that a SpaceX HR official warned Musk against making such an action before conducting a formal investigation, but the executive is said to have replied, “I don’t care — fire them.”
The eight engineers have already taken their concerns to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The lawsuit also follows a June 11th Wall Street Journal report alleging that Musk had sexual relations with two SpaceX employees. A third woman told WSJ that she denied Musk’s repeated requests for her to bear his children, leading him to complain about her work performance and deny her a raise.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Via: Bloomberg
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