It was a pinch-me moment in Kelly Stonelake’s career.
In 2017, at a prestigious advertising awards event in Cannes, France, she was invited to meet and chat with Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, a high-profile champion of women in the workplace, and Facebook’s then COO. Stonelake was a mid-level creative director for the tech giant at the time, and one of her team projects had been shortlisted for an award. In fact, Sandberg was about to take the stage to discuss, among other topics, Stonelake’s work.
“It felt great,” Stonelake, 37, recently told Fortune. “I mean, the degree to which I admired and loved our company and its seniormost leadership was significant.”
But even on that triumphant day, Stonelake would encounter what she would come to see as a dark side of corporate culture at Facebook, according to a lawsuit she filed this month. “Later, at a party with a group of colleagues,” it reads, “a male executive in her management chain said drunkenly, ‘Hey Kelly, what would your husband say if you called him right now and said that you f---ed me?’”
Stonelake’s suit against her former employer, known as Meta since 2021, accuses the company of sex discrimination and retaliation. The court document describes a series of alleged events over Stonelake’s 15-year career at the company, including sexual assault, missed promotions, and stonewalling from managers when she voiced concerns about the safety of minors using Meta’s Horizon products.
Her career at the company ended in a yearlong emergency mental health break, during which time, according to the complaint, she “was ultimately laid off due to extended medical leave.” Her last day as an employee was Jan. 8, 2024.
Meta declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation.
Stonelake is one of a long line of women to feel mistreated and sidelined by a male-dominated culture in Silicon Valley. Her lawsuit also comes as Meta makes headlines for rolling back its diversity policies, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks up the value of “masculine energy” just weeks before laying off 3,600 employees for what he termed “low performance.”
Andi Mazingo, a founder and plaintiff-side attorney of Lumen Law Center in Los Angeles, says she’s meeting with former Meta employees who believe that sexism and discrimination played a role in their termination during Meta’s latest round of cuts on Feb. 10. Mazingo, who has not met Stonelake, said the themes of the long-tenured employee’s case “resonate with what I've been hearing from employees impacted by the layoffs. It's a troubling pattern of women and other vulnerable employees, especially those on parental leave, potentially facing disproportionate layoffs.”
As Meta’s leaders ramp up the company’s AI ambitions, Stonelake says she worries about the environment women working at Meta will experience. “I fear what any kind of high-pressure strategic area is going to look like and feel like within Meta when it's unchecked, particularly where there is encouragement on a global stage for the company to be more masculine,” she told Fortune.
As with many cases claiming a pattern of discrimination, it will be up to the court to determine what is true, and exactly what kind of dynamics played out behind events that stretch back to 2009. Stonelake’s lawsuit largely relies on her memories of exchanges, but also quotes glowing performance reviews and refers to screenshots of hostile messages from men that Stonelake brought to HR.
For years, Stonelake says she felt she needed to change herself in order to thrive at the tech giant. As she came up against discrimination repeatedly, she kept asking, “‘What can I do? What could it have been about me?’”
“I feel really sad about that,” she says. “Because it's time for Meta to start asking that question.”
Allegations of assault, harassment, and roadblocks
Stonelake was recruited to the social media site Facebook in 2009, just three years after it became available beyond college campuses and five years after it launched in 2004. She quit a job at Apple to join the Menlo Park startup as a platform marketer.
Stonelake says she believed in the early days that she was building something useful for the world and human connectivity. Her initial job involved working with games and app developers on third-party data safety. She then moved into a more traditional marketing role, partnering with businesses to create advertising campaigns and interactive experiences. She was also a founding member of the Creative Shop, a kind of internal agency for Facebook’s advertising clients.
But it took little time for a young Stonelake—she started at Facebook when she was only 21—to encounter predatory sexism, according to the court filing. Early in her tenure, a male coworker grabbed Stonelake’s crotch over her pants at a weekly company-wide gathering and then “shamed” her for complaining about it later, her suit alleges. He told her that his hand touched her by accident, Stonelake’s lawyer explains in the complaint.
In another alleged incident two years later, Stonelake accompanied her then boss on a business trip to Seattle, according to court documents. After a sushi dinner with wine, her suit alleges, he offered to walk her to her hotel room, telling her they could go over meeting prep material. But “[d]espite Ms. Stonelake explicitly saying ‘no’ and ‘stop,’” according to the court filing, her boss “attempted to force his tongue into her mouth, he pushed her onto the bed and put his hands down her pants, under her jeans and underwear.” After finally pushing him off, according to the lawsuit, Stonelake said she “presumably passed out,” then awoke later to find they were both asleep on the bed in their clothes, and then “screamed at him to leave.”
Weeks after that, the same boss told her on a business trip to New York that the only route to a promotion involved sleeping with him, her lawsuit alleges. In the basement bar at the W Hotel in New York’s Union Square district, he called sex with him the “‘fast track’ for attractive women.” When Stonelake declined the offer, according to the filing, she was not promoted.
While Stonelake was enduring alleged sexual assaults and unwanted advances, Facebook was touting the arrival of a still-recent C-suite leader: Sheryl Sandberg. The new chief operating officer arrived at Facebook in 2008, having held influential roles at the U.S. Treasury Department, consulting group McKinsey, and Google. She was widely seen as the proverbial “adult in the room” who would guide the startup run by men barely out of college and help make it a profitable business for the first time.
In 2013, Sandberg published Lean In, a book that examined the invisible barriers holding back professional women, and urging women to take their own aspirations seriously, aim for leadership roles, and not pull back from their careers because they planned to have or already had children. The idea of “leaning in,” Sandberg once told Good Morning America, is about “believing your voice matters.” The book attracted criticism from those who found it elitist and out of touch with the realities of most women’s lives. But it also found scores of fans, and Sandberg became a bona fide corporate celebrity. (She appeared on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s list 12 times.)
Having such a loud and high-profile champion of women’s rights as the second in command at Facebook may have made a difference in terms of metrics: The company’s data prior to Sandberg’s 2022 departure showed an uptick of women who reached the director rank after Sandberg joined. “I think pretty instantly the culture reacted to Sheryl's expectations,” Stonelake adds. “And what I didn't appreciate at the time was that when those overt behaviors are reduced or eliminated, that it's only going to strengthen the pathways by which insidious and discriminatory behavior flows freely.”
Stonelake contends that discrimination and the silencing of women who raised concerns continued for years, and that while she once attributed rumors of bias and poor treatment to bad actors in the system, ultimately Meta’s top leadership should be held accountable. “I had heard all of the same things that everyone else heard about Meta and felt like there was some huge fundamental misunderstanding,” she told Fortune. “And I realize now it's because I had blinders on to everything except for what was right in front of me.”
The lawsuit references Sandberg’s appearance at Cannes but does not contain any allegations against the former COO. Sheryl Sandberg declined to comment for this story.
Failure to thrive
In late 2012, Stonelake was able to transfer to a new office, in Seattle, and spent the next three years working for a manager her court filing describes as “an invaluable mentor, one of the strongest allies of her career.” But this period of calm was short-lived. By 2016, her career was complicated again by a new boss, she says.
“He constantly undermined and belittled her, regularly made sexist and offensive comments, overtly and tacitly condoned similar comments by his male reports, and held her to higher standards than her male counterparts,” her lawsuit alleges. In one scene described in court documents, this manager wrapped his arm around Stonelake and asked how he could better support her. When she said she needed specific and productive feedback, the filing says, her manager described a female coworker at a previous job as a cautionary tale. “[S]he was old, and a mom,” he said, Stonelake’s lawsuit alleges. “And no one liked her because every time she opened her mouth she was right and no one wants to work with a woman who is always right.”
When Stonelake reported this exchange to managers, “nothing happened,” the complaint says. Then, when it came time to evaluate employees for a promotion, Stonelake’s boss told her that she would have to “lap” her male colleague and “land the plane” to be promoted, according to the filing, even though the promotion framework was not designed for employees to directly compete with one another. Stonelake also had to write her own case for becoming a director, according to the suit, which her male colleague was not asked to do. “She pushed back against this obvious double standard and was met with hostility,” the lawsuit states.
Stonelake did rise to the director rank in 2017, according to her LinkedIn profile. But her complaint outlines additional conflicts with this manager over the next few years. By 2020, her relationship with him “became untenable,” the lawsuit states.
Stonelake was ultimately recruited to take on a different job within the company as a product marketing manager for the developer platform. In this job, she took a leading role in fixing the initial rollout of new data protection requirements across the platform, according to the suit, which the company adopted in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a historic $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission. Stonelake’s complaint describes the first rollout as a “catastrophe” that “resulted in significant business interruption for hundreds of strategic partnership and advertising partners.” A subsequent performance review praised the work she did on her team and across the platform, with her manager praising her “selfless, scrappy” work, per court documents.
But no promotion came, despite promotions for “the men all around her,” according to her complaint. She was told that someone needed to take the fall for the initial rollout, the lawsuit states, despite Stonelake not having been part of that push.
Stonelake greatly admired the boss who made these comments and was “crushed” that she was not getting a promotion they had discussed. Even when she lapped the man and landed the plane, the complaint states, using italics for emphasis, “she still might be the scapegoat.”
Although this manager declined to promote Stonelake twice, he praised her in performance reviews, the filing states, and when he moved to a new role working on Meta’s Horizon virtual reality platform, “he took Ms. Stonelake and her team with him.”
The final straw for Stonelake happened after she became a product marketing manager for Horizon, the company’s virtual-reality platform. As an interim leader in her new role, Stonelake launched a “listening tour” to connect with others and found that many employees reported bullying behavior from the top leadership, especially toward women, her lawsuit states.
She later learned that the all-male product leadership team, under pressure to expand its user base to teenagers, was allegedly ignoring red flags first raised by another woman, a marketing leader connected to the project, according to the filing, which describes this woman as “a talented and seasoned leader in her field.”
“The safety issues included rampant hate speech and bullying on the platform, and inadequate parental controls, in violation of Meta’s regulatory requirements,” the complaint says. It also states that testing showed Black avatars who ventured into the game were consistently met with racial slurs, including the n-word, and the product leaders were aware of this problem. Stonelake backed the woman who had called for a pause in the rollout until issues could be addressed, according to the complaint.
Horizon’s leaders rejected her suggestion and began blocking Stonelake from meetings under the pretense of keeping confidential information secure, her complaint contends. Eventually, Horizon’s leadership ordered a pause to review safety issues without acknowledging that two women had made that suggestion first, the suit alleges.
When Stonelake came up for a promotion again, her manager told her that he couldn’t document what Stonelake had said because it would “expose the failures of male leaders whose support she needed for promotion,” according to her court filing. “He told her that ‘this is how it works’ at senior levels…and promised to ‘make it right’ in the future if she continued performing at her current level.”
Stonelake told Fortune that the Horizon situation was the first time she had been asked to put profits before safety at the company. Her previous frustrations with alleged discrimination felt like private affairs, but she couldn’t abide the idea of marketing a product with what she says were serious ethical lapses. Stonelake took a leave of absence and landed in intensive outpatient treatment for many months “due to acute suicidality and PTSD,” the court document says.
Medical leaves had become common for women in Reality Labs, the department behind Meta’s VR products, the legal filing states. Some 20 product marketing managers at the VP and director levels were assigned to this team, of whom four were women, and Stonelake was the third to take a medical leave, the lawsuit claims. (Fortune could not identify those women, and Stonelake did not want to name them to protect their privacy.)
According to Stonelake’s lawsuit, the other two women did not return to the company.
A larger pattern of discrimination
Stonelake is seeking damages for her time at Meta, and hopes to recover back pay and benefits. The exact amount would be determined during a trial.
She is one of several ex-employees who have brought recent suits accusing the company of gender-based discrimination, retaliating against them when they spoke out about a problem, or both. In October, a former engineer at Meta in New York filed a lawsuit accusing the company of violating anti-retaliation laws by downgrading his pay and asking him to resign after he spoke out about gender discrimination. Jeffrey Smith, the engineer, had worked at Meta for six years, according to his complaint, but his “upward trajectory stopped suddenly when, beginning in the summer of 2023, he began to raise concerns about misogyny and the treatment of women in the workplace.” Meta has moved to have the case go to arbitration, citing Smith’s employment contract.
Yuet Peng Cheong, a product manager in Meta’s generative AI branch, raised a red flag about what she perceived to be retaliation and unfair termination for speaking out when she believed her manager was inflating ad revenue figures for Meta’s AI products. She is suing the company in San Francisco County Superior Court; litigation is ongoing. Another former employee, Talia Kennedy, a product manager who worked at the company from 2018 to 2022, is also suing Meta in that state court, alleging that “she raised concerns about harassment and discrimination at work and, as a result, experienced a retaliatory and discriminatory wrongful termination of her employment,” according to that lawsuit.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment about these cases. Court records show the company is seeking to move Cheong’s case to arbitration. Meta told the Bay Area News that Cheong’s allegations are “without merit” and said it would “vigorously defend against them.” Court records show that litigation is also ongoing in Kennedy’s case.
Deena Merlen, an attorney and partner at Reavis Page Jump in New York, who is not involved with Stonelake’s case but reviewed the complaint, told Fortune that although there are issues and challenges with any legal cases, “Kelly Stonelake’s allegations are certainly concerning and should be taken seriously by Meta.” The allegations, she also said, were all too common across industries.
In cases like Stonelake’s, employers can sometimes shield themselves with what’s known as the Faragher-Ellerth defense, Merlen explained. That essentially says an employer may not be held liable for harassing behavior at the company when it has taken reasonable actions to prevent it and the employee failed to take advantage of the company’s tools. Meta does have a hotline for reporting code of conduct violations.
But Stonelake didn’t always connect her struggles with company-wide issues or a problem at the top. For nearly her entire career, she saw her issues with male bosses as personal obstacles. She now believes there’s a larger pattern.
“Whether it was the boss assaulting me or telling me that I needed to have sex with him to get a promotion, or whether it was telling me that I couldn't be recognized because of the ways it would negatively impact a male VP who had made a mistake, all of these behaviors come down to a disregard for women,” Stonelake says.
“When you get to the place where making women smaller feels like a strategic advantage,” she adds, “we have to take a step back and ask: How did we get this far?”
If you are a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about your experience at the company, please reach out at lila.maclellan@fortune.com or find me on Signal: LilaMM.38.
