• by Danielle Oster , Staff Writer, February 24, 2025

Last month, Meta announced updates to its “hateful conduct” policy -- including permitting speech referring to “women as household objects or property.”  A recent lawsuit suggests the policies are part of a broader toxic, misogynist culture at the company.

Kelly Stonelake, a 15-year Meta veteran and onetime product marketing director, filed a lawsuit on Feb. 3 in King County Superior Court, accusing Meta of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

Meta has not replied to a request for comment.

Stonelake claims in the lawsuit that she experienced a pattern of “persistent discrimination and different standards than her male colleagues” dating back nearly to the beginning of her employment at Facebook. This included a co-worker who “grabbed Ms. Stonelake’s crotch over her pants at a weekly company sanctioned on-campus drinking event called ‘League’ regularly attended by [Facebook executives including] Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth,” according to the lawsuit.

In 2011, when she was 23 years old, Stonelake alleges she was sexually assaulted by her boss during a business trip, which she notes was three months after he had attended her wedding. On a separate business trip, she claimed, the boss -- referred to as “MF” in the lawsuit --  “told her she wouldn't be promoted unless she had sex with him.”

Her boss’s continued harassment prompted Stonelake to propose transferring her marketing role to Seattle, she claims. Some time after moving to Seattle in December, 2012, she reported her boss’s harassment to multiple managers, she says, but the company didn’t take any action and he remained at the company for years “without consequence.”

She rose the ranks at Meta for the following decade, but continued to ”experience offensive, sexist comments from colleagues and clients and be held to different standards by multiple other male bosses in separate organizations within Meta” during her remaining 13 years there, according to the complaint.

In 2022, while leading Meta's Horizon virtual reality platform expansion, Stonelake alleges she “identified serious product stability issues and product safety issues that put children at risk of immediate exposure to hate speech, sexual harassment, and bullying.” She supported a “female marketing director” who had called for “a quality pause on the rollout” of the VR expansion, but had been repeatedly “dismissed by Vivek Sharma, Vishal Shah, and Jeff Lin, and the all-male Horizon product leadership team.”

Meta’s Horizon leadership team responded by removing her from weekly leadership meetings, Stonelake claims, and not long after, the “now all male” leadership team called for a "quality lockdown” without acknowledging the safety concerns.

Then, in January of 2023, she claims she was “explicitly told she would be denied a promotion because documenting her achievements would expose failures by male leaders whose support she needed” – after being denied a promotion for similar reasons a year earlier.

Stonelake took a medical leave of absence the following month for severe depression and suicidality, which she says stemmed from her treatment as a Meta employee.

“While completing an intensive outpatient program to address the suicidality that began as a result of her years of treatment at Meta,” the lawsuit contends, “she was notified in September of 2023 that she would be laid off, and her final day at Meta was in January, 2024.”

That same month, Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that corporate culture needed more masculine energy.

Stonelake contends in her lawsuit she isn’t the only female leader subjected to such treatment at the company, but rather one of three women leaders at Meta’s Reality Labs division that were driven to take emergency medical leave and not return. The lawsuit is asking for relief including lost pay and benefits, and emotional damages.

“Where Mark Zuckerberg rants about companies needing to be more masculine, where he actively dismantles his DEI teams, and where he smokescreens safeguards, my case demonstrates something inarguable,” Stonelate wrote near the conclusion of her Substack post about the lawsuit: “toxic and discriminatory environments aren’t just wrong, they’re anti-innovation. Hating women hurts everyone. “