Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Meta, is being investigated by the company for pressuring a publication to bury two stories about her former boyfriend, a new report says.
Sandberg contacted the Daily Mail in 2016 and 2019 to prevent it from publishing a story revealing that a former girlfriend procured a temporary restraining order against Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard and Sandberg’s boyfriend at the time, sources told the Wall Street Journal in a report published Thursday. She is now under investigation at Meta after the outlet declined to publish the unflattering account.
“Sheryl Sandberg never threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision. This story attempts to make connections that don’t exist,” Meta said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
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Coordinating with employees at Facebook, Activision, and outside firms, Sandberg strategized ways to dissuade the outlet from publishing a story about the restraining order she feared would tarnish her reputation as a champion for women, according to the report.
There were conflicting details on how she sought to bury the story. Some sources claimed Kotick told confidants in 2016 that Sandberg threatened publishing the article could damage the Daily Mail’s ties with Facebook, according to the report. However, Kotick denied this, saying, “I never said anything like that.”
When the Daily Mail began looking into the story again in 2019, she reportedly emailed the chairman of the outlet’s parent company about her concerns and the article, though sources at the Daily Mail familiar with the exchange said they did not feel threatened.
Kotick’s former girlfriend was granted a restraining order after the CEO showed up at the former girlfriend’s home while being “bullying and controlling nature,” the unnamed woman alleged. While attempting to quash the story, Sandberg and her allies tried to figure out what the Daily Mail knew and how to persuade it that Kotick had been wrongly accused, per the Thursday report.
The Daily Mail did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Kotick faced a number of workplace harassment claims at Activision Blizzard. He received an email from a lawyer claiming her client was raped by a supervisor at the company, Thursday’s report said. The company settled the claim months later, but Kotick reportedly failed to inform the board.
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He was also accused of harassing one of his assistants and threatening to have her killed in 2006, the Verge reported. The following year, a flight attendant on a jet he co-owned alleged he sexually harassed her and then fired her after she discussed it with the other co-owner, per the report.
Sandberg has cultivated an image of being an advocate for women. She authored Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, a book about female leadership, in 2013 and created LeanIn.org, which aims to help women fulfill their ambitions. Last month, she declared that “no two countries run by women would ever go to war,” likely a dig at men for the war in Ukraine.
