Company News Stardock sexual harassment lawsuit dropped

[Roguey]

I hate that I'll never know if suit was dropped because she did in fact cause some damage on her way out or because she couldn't afford the legal costs from dealing with his countersuit.

But the fact remains that she was sexually harassed.

How can one be so sure?

Even a written apology doesn't mean anything anymore in this fucked up system. Sometimes you're forced to admit to crimes you didn't commit when you want to speed up a settlement.

I didn't delved much in this case, but the problem with those kind office sexual harassment case is that neither sides bring any proof, yet the benefit of the doubt is too often given to the plaintiff.

He admitted to it in an email.

#3, however is not acceptable to me. I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person and I'm not inclined to change my behavior. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.

#4, Again, I am not willing to adapt my behavior to suit others. IF you find my behavior problematic, I recommend finding another job.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

She's getting paid, he get's a nonpology.

 

[commie]

Bradwell is a piece of shit.

You're just jealous. It's what you'd like to do to your co-workers all the time but just don't have the rank to get away with it.

I'm unemployed ATM.

Condolences bro. I know how it is/was.

 

[oldmanpaco]

#3, however is not acceptable to me. I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person and I'm not inclined to change my behavior. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.

#4, Again, I am not willing to adapt my behavior to suit others. IF you find my behavior problematic, I recommend finding another job.

That could mean anything.

 

[abnaxus]

StarDOCK? I guess this was settled in the sauna.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

He admitted to it in an email.

#3, however is not acceptable to me. I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person and I'm not inclined to change my behavior. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.

#4, Again, I am not willing to adapt my behavior to suit others. IF you find my behavior problematic, I recommend finding another job.

Could be the reply he sent after she complained about him doing politically incorrect jokes.

This could mean a lot of things, not necessarily sexual harassment.

 

[Roguey]

That could mean anything.

This could mean a lot of things, not necessarily sexual harassment.

Do you guys not know what sexual harassment is?

 

[Irenaeus]

That could mean anything.

This could mean a lot of things, not necessarily sexual harassment.

Do you guys not know what sexual harassment is?

Rejecting a man?

 

[dnf]

That could mean anything.

This could mean a lot of things, not necessarily sexual harassment.

Do you guys not know what sexual harassment is?

Being an unnatractive male.

 

[oldmanpaco]

That could mean anything.

This could mean a lot of things, not necessarily sexual harassment.

Do you guys not know what sexual harassment is?

I was a manger for 14 years. They beat the hell out of you with harassment training.

Also any email can be used out of context.

Anyway you seem stressed. Can I send you something pretty to wear? It will make you feel better.

 

[Roguey]

I was a manger for 14 years. They beat the hell out of you with harassment training.

Also any email can be used out of context.

Anyway you seem stressed. Can I send you something pretty to wear? It will make you feel better.

They were a response to

Please be careful with your "jokes" which are at many times inappropriate, sexist, vulgar and very embarrassing not only to me, but everyone present.
Please keep your negative personal opinions of others (including family members and/or coworkers) not present at the time of your comments, to yourself. I feel, at times, it puts me in a very uncomfortable position.

Being familiar with harassment, you should know that inappropriate jokes count, even if the person being harassed isn't the recipient.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I was a manger for 14 years. They beat the hell out of you with harassment training.

Also any email can be used out of context.

Anyway you seem stressed. Can I send you something pretty to wear? It will make you feel better.

They were a response to

Please be careful with your "jokes" which are at many times inappropriate, sexist, vulgar and very embarrassing not only to me, but everyone present.
Please keep your negative personal opinions of others (including family members and/or coworkers) not present at the time of your comments, to yourself. I feel, at times, it puts me in a very uncomfortable position.

Being familiar with harassment, you should know that inappropriate jokes count, even if the person being harassed isn't the recipient.

yeah, yeah. Women take the fun out of every workplace.

 

[Gregz]

Being familiar with harassment, you should know that inappropriate jokes count, even if the person being harassed isn't the recipient.

Tell us of your experiences, more detail the better.

 

[dnf]

Bitches in tech.

 

[GarfunkeL]

You guys do realize that Roguey is right, right? No matter how much we might want to rail against political correctness and laugh about sexual harassment etc, the reality is that vast majority of workplaces in N.America and Europe take these things extremely seriously - if only because the media absolutely loves this shit and will always blow it out of all proportion.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

According to Brad Stardock is a very laid back studio. There is no evidence of harassment, rather it's just the typical fratboy kind of environment. Immature but innocent and not ill intended.

 

[commie]

Game making nerds make wimmin jokes. News at 11.

 

[drae]

Could be the reply he sent after she complained about him doing politically incorrect jokes.

It was. Full emails are below:

Brad,

I wanted to talk to you about some of the events that happened on our media tour on 5/27/2010 to San Francisco, CA. This past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me and I've struggled about some of the things you said and did at dinner on Wednesday, 5/29/2010. Dinner ended up being extremely awkward and I really feel that I need to address what happened. As a professional working for you, I would really appreciate it, if in the future you would please refrain from the following behaviors:

1. Please never touch my hair or any of my body parts; not even jokingly.
2. Please do not talk about my private life or about my boyfriend/future husband in any terms especially negative terms.
3. Please be careful with your "jokes" which are at many times inappropriate, sexist, vulgar and very embarrassing not only to me, but everyone present.
4. Please keep your negative personal opinions of others (including family members and/or coworkers) not present at the time of your comments, to yourself. I feel, at times, it puts me in a very uncomfortable position.

With the above few behavioral changes, I'm hoping our previously friendly and professional relationship can be reestablished. My goal from day one (June 04, 2007) has been to work for this company 110% and to work together with my peers to build a high quality, successful company. I would like to continue to work with you in the future and keep striving towards that very goal.

Respectfully,
Alexandra MisetaP

The reply

Hi Alexandra,

Thank you for bringing these up to me as I certainly do not want you to feel uncomfortable at work.

I don't recall item #1 but will certainly endeavor to be extra careful.

I understand #2. I will be more conscious of this in the future.

#3, however is not acceptable to me. I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person and I'm not inclined to change my behavior. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.

#4, Again, I am not willing to adapt my behavior to suit others. IF you find my behavior problematic, I recommend finding another job.

I'm not some manager or coworker of yours. I own the company. It, and your job here, exist to suit my purposes, not vice versa. The company is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end which is to further the objectives of its shareholders (in this case, me).

While I certainly agree that your rights as a person (certainly in terms of physical contact or interms of comments made towards you regarding your private live) take precedence over my rights as the owner of the business, that is as far as it goes.

I sincerely apologize for offending you while on our trip. I certainly would never intentionally try to upset you or make you uncomfortable and will endeavor to avoid doing so in the future. However, I won't change my basic personality to suit anyone (i.e. being an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar and embarrassing person).

Kind regards,
Brad

Nothing malicious in the behaviour imo. If she doesn't feel comfortable working there, then she should leave. EDIT: Wrong tenses. If she didn't feel comfortable working there, then she should have just left ... earlier than she did, officially, and giving proper notice.

Furthermore, while this is technically a case of sexual harassment, cases like these devalue and take the attention away from the serious cases of sexual harassment. It's one of the problems with feminism as a whole, actually. Too many inane crusades means the serious issues get less air time.

 

[drae]

Follow up letter made by Brad:

Ok, I'm going to respond here since I'm being directly accused of something.

The incident that started this happened back in 2010. Myself, Alexandra, and a few others were at a pub while waiting to go to the Qt3 dinner that Lloyd case had set up.

While there, Alexandra got teased and got mad. At the time, i didn't realize she was so upset about it. So we went to the Qt3 get together (that some here may have even been at) and that.

She later emailed me telling me she was mad about the incident - to which I apologized for hurting her feeligs but also insisted that I watch what jokes I tell around the office. (To understand the context, we're a relaxed software company, lots of Family guy jokes, Simpsons references, Robot Chicken references, etc.). To which I responded, admittedly, very very harshly to.

Now, you can argue that I was a jerk in how I responded to her. But it does not justify her getting pissed off, quitting without notice and using her network access to wipe out our marketing assets 3 weeks before the ship of the game forcing me and a few other key team members to scramble at the last second to deal with it.

In addition, I would ask those who are so quick to condemn me personally to ask themselves this - what impact do you think it would have on your team if a key person quit, wiped out a bunch of stuff and made a bunch of legal theats? Think of the effect it would have around the office.

NO one has suggested that if she hadn't done this that Elemental would have been a great game. But there is a huge gulf between having a "great game" and a "total disaster". The ultimate blame for the game's failure lies with me for reasons I've stated countless times. But that doesn't excuse someone from maliciously and intentionally wiping out years worth of marketing data, assets, etc.

And the charge that this is "retaliatory" is ridiculous and, frankly, offensive to not just me but virtually everyone here at Stardock - who I can assure you are at least as pissed off as I was about what she did.

The only thing that has recently changed is that our case against her got moved to federal court and that we have continued our position of not settling her frivolous case.

 

[dnf]

Bitches in Tech
The internet is buzzing with the Adria Richards dongle incident that demonstrates what everyone knows, but that until now no one could say, not even me: That women in the tech industry are frequently humorless, dangerous, threatening, difficult, unreasonable, and hard to work with. In a word, bitches. That women bring drama and soap opera to the workplace, and males are unable or unwilling to prevent them.

Bitches in tech get a double dose of privilege. Firstly, just by being female they are, like all females, privileged, the routine recipients of instinctive white knighting, given special protection from their own screw ups and misdeeds, never expected to take responsibility for anything, even if they would like to take responsibility, indeed never able to take responsibility for anything even if they want to and are competent to do it. Regardless of whether a female can actually do the work, as in any industry, if some of the work is difficult, or has large consequences if done wrong, she is apt to get a lowly white male assistant to do any of the work that is difficult to do, and take the blame for any of the work that is apt to go badly wrong. For example Marie Curie did not extract radium from pitchblende nor determine its chemical properties. Debierne did. Perhaps he did so while carrying out her idea and under her supervision, but all the contemporary evidence indicates he did so while carrying out Pierre Curie’s idea under Pierre Curie’s supervision.

Political Correctness gave Marie Curie two Nobel prizes of work that no one paid the slightest attention to when a man did it, for example Dorn and the discovery of Radon. But it was something more ancient that made it unnecessary for her to do the actual discovering herself.

Because eggs are more valuable than sperm, men inherently tend to treat women as more valuable than men, which results in disruptive female behavior in the workplace.

Secondly, since women are markedly less capable of tech than males, they are particularly underrepresented in tech, and underrepresentation is of course illegal, so any time they have a real or imagined grievance, they can sic the state onto the company and any random males in the company that they happen to capriciously feel like destroying, thus females in tech much more privileged, much more dangerous, than females in other industries.

This double dose of privilege causes grotesquely inflated egos, which in turn causes casual and unthinking arrogance, capricious malice, and reckless malice.

The internet is buzzing about Adria Richards and the dongle joke, which buzz got her fired and is causing all sorts of bad consequences for her. This might seem evidence against the thesis that women in tech are extraordinarily privileged – except that Adria Richards has been a vicious malevolent disruptive drama queen bitch for many a year, and has never suffered any consequences for it until this time, when her latest little piece of nastiness went viral and blew up in her face.

Sometime ago, at Gasonics, a female employee complained her supervisor was sexually harassing her. She was assigned to a different supervisor. I never observed her doing any actual work, while I did observe her vigorously attempting to seduce her new supervisor, on one occasion diving under his desk. Eventually she made a complaint of sexual harassment against her new supervisor, and was transferred to me. I immediately asked her, in the presence of numerous witnesses, while standing a quite considerable distance from her, to perform a task that she considered beneath her dignity – though I had been doing it.

I left her to it. Some hours passed, and it did not get done. I courteously chided her about this, again in the presence of numerous witnesses, and she responded with a raised voice and sharp words. I lost my temper and proceeded to shout her down. Immediately my boss, and his boss, came into workshop at a dead run, as if the place was on fire. She proceeded to embrace my boss and weep noisily and wetly on his shoulder.

Men just don’t do stuff like that. The presence of fertile age women in the workplace is just inherently disruptive, partly because they are inherently inclined to certain kinds of misbehavior (drama), mostly because men are inherently unwilling to restrain them from bad behavior, partly because political correctness forbids us to restrain them from bad behavior characteristic of females.

Men, and women past fertile age, do not weep on the shoulder of their boss’s boss.

Fertile age women in the workplace are very likely to have sex with their boss, or their boss’s boss, that being human nature, and if they manage to restrain themselves, they will not restrain themselves from giving their boss high hopes whenever they want to get their way, which enables profoundly disruptive behavior.

If a woman has sex with her boss, she will not view her equals as equals, but inferiors, indeed as nonexistent, resulting in damaging and disruptive behavior. If she has sex with her boss’s boss, or is even thinking about having sex with her boss’s boss, she will treat her boss as inferior or non existent, resulting in very damaging and disruptive behavior.

 

[Ninjerk]

You guys do realize that Roguey is right, right? No matter how much we might want to rail against political correctness and laugh about sexual harassment etc, the reality is that vast majority of workplaces in N.America and Europe take these things extremely seriously - if only because the media absolutely loves this shit and will always blow it out of all proportion.

They say they do, anyways. In my limited experience there's a positive relationship between intensity of sexual harassment training and how much willful sexual "harassment" goes on in said environment.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

There wasn't any rape or molestation as fr as I can telll... so why the ?

 

[Ninjerk]

http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-03-21...eeting-about-sexual-jokes-at-tech-conference/

Not surprisingly, Adria Richards is getting a barrage of harassment on her social networks, like being called a “bitch” and told “fuck you” and “you aren’t a hero.” Some of it is just anger. Some of it is straight-up sexist. All of it seems to me like a bunch of fucking bullshit that strangers get so worked up spewing venom at a woman they don’t even know. Don’t they get it this is why she spoke out in the first place?

Author is trying to be ironic?

 

[Overboard]

There wasn't any rape or molestation as fr as I can telll... so why the ?

It appears that hurting a woman's feelings is a form of rape.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

There wasn't any rape or molestation as fr as I can telll... so why the ?

It appears that hurting a woman's feelings is a form of rape.

Goddamn these undomesticated snowmen!!

 

[Roguey]

According to Brad Stardock is a very laid back studio. There is no evidence of harassment, rather it's just the typical fratboy kind of environment. Immature but innocent and not ill intended.

Harassment doesn't need malicious intent to be so. This is the law in the US.

She's getting paid, he get's a nonpology.

Brad said he didn't have to pay her anything.