Ex-meta Director Sues The Tech Giant, Alleging A 'toxic Pattern Of Silencing Women'

Kelly Stonelake, a former Meta employee, filed a lawsuit against the company in February.

Courtesy of Kelly Stonelake

• A former director at Meta filed a lawsuit against the company on Monday.
• The plaintiff, Kelly Stonelake, alleges sex discrimination and harassment.
• Stonelake also alleges Meta has a "toxic pattern of silencing women who identify problems."

A former Meta employee filed a lawsuit Monday alleging the tech giant has a "toxic pattern of silencing women who identify problems."

Kelly Stonelake, a former director of product marketing for Meta's Reality Labs org, filed the lawsuit Monday in Washington state. The suit alleges sex discrimination and says Stonelake faced retaliation for "opposing Meta's illegal activity and violations of public policy."

Meta declined to comment on the suit.

Stonelake joined the company in 2009, back when Meta was still called Facebook. The lawsuit says she was laid off in January 2024 following a medical leave. In the complaint, Stonelake says she faced sexual harassment at the company and alleges she was sexually assaulted by a former boss at Facebook.

The lawsuit accuses Meta of wider problems, as well. The suit says that within the Horizon World org, female employees "reported feeling their voices were considered less valuable and that differential treatment was openly permitted." Stonelake's complaint says female staffers raised specific safety concerns in 2022 that were dismissed by Meta's "all-male Horizon product leadership team."

Specifically, the suit says that a female colleague of Stonelake's had advocated for a "quality pause" before expanding Horizon World to teens. She had expressed concerns that the product did not have "adequate" parental and safety controls and did not meet product quality, the suit says. Horizon World is a virtual-reality video game played on Meta's Quest headsets.

Stonelake escalated the concerns to Horizon's leadership, and was later excluded from weekly leadership meetings, the suit says.

"I was the only voice in a room that was otherwise all men advocating for a change," Stonelake told Business Insider in an interview.

She told BI she filed the suit to hold Meta "accountable to responsible, durable business."

"Discrimination in tech isn't just an ethical issue — it's anti-innovation, it's irresponsible, and it causes harm on a scale that only technology companies can achieve," Stonelake told BI.

She is seeking lost wages, as well as damages for emotional distress and attorney fees.

"This lawsuit has been a long time coming," Stonelake told BI. "As I've gotten further and further away from Meta, it's become clearer and clearer that in order to get accountability, I need to file a lawsuit."

The lawsuit comes at a charged moment for Meta, which recently announced sweeping changes to its content moderation and workplace policies.

In January, the company updated its hateful conduct guidelines to permit certain previously prohibited content. Meta also rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and eliminated its network of third-party fact-checkers.

Shortly after rolling out these changes, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan podcast, where he advocated for more "masculine energy" in corporate culture.

"I do think that there's just something … having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive," Zuckerberg said on the podcast.

Zuckerberg acknowledged on the podcast that women face systemic barriers in tech companies. He also said corporations had overcorrected in trying to address those challenges. The tech industry swung too far toward viewing masculinity as "toxic," he said.

These policy shifts come amid broader political pressures and changes.

The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg had met with Trump advisor Stephen Miller at Mar-a-Lago late last year, and that Miller had warned that Trump would target DEI culture at companies like Meta. The report said that Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's former chief operating officer, for the company's inclusivity initiatives.

Zuckerberg denied the New York Times report on Threads, praising Sandberg as "a legend in the industry." Sandberg responded by thanking him for his friendship. Several prominent female executives at Meta including Naomi Gleit, its head of product, and Iska Saric, Zuckerberg's head of communications, also defended Zuckerberg on the platform. Gleit called him a "champion of women."

"I used to think the gap between Meta's public statements and the internal experience of working there was a bug or a misunderstanding to resolve," Stonelake told BI. "Now I believe it to be a feature, a core strategy of how Meta is able to keep really good people focused on really harmful work."