Ex-Facebook employee alleges sexual harassment and human rights failures in new memoir

In a memoir set to be published Tuesday, a former Facebook employee lays out allegations of misconduct at the company, including claims of sexual harassment and what she says were incomplete statements to Congress about Facebook’s relationship with China.

Sarah Wynn-Williams says in the book and in an exclusive interview with NBC News that she faced retaliation from the company after she reported sexual harassment by her boss, Joel Kaplan, who at the time was a vice president for global public policy. Kaplan has since become chief global affairs officer, serving as the company’s public face in Washington and other world capitals. 

Meta, which owns Facebook, said in a statement Sunday that the book includes “false accusations about our executives.” The company confirmed that Wynn-Williams accused Kaplan of sexual harassment, but it said an investigation cleared him in 2017. 

Wynn-Williams was fired that year. She said she believes the decision was retaliation after she complained about Kaplan. Meta says she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.” Elliot Schrage, who was one of Wynn-Williams’ supervisors, said in a statement that he fired her “based on her repeated failures” to address performance concerns such as “indecision, shifting focus, and failure to execute on hiring” on the policy leadership team. 

Wynn-Williams is a former director of global public policy, making her one of the highest-ranking former Facebook employees to come forward as a critic of the company. Hired in 2011, when the company’s public policy team was small, she managed a growing staff and oversaw government relations for entire continents, including Asia and South America. She reported to corporate vice presidents and had direct contact with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, then the chief operating officer. 

Wynn-Williams also alleges that Sandberg crossed professional lines with her and another employee in a way that made her uncomfortable.

The memoir covers the six-plus years when Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, met foreign officials and accompanied Zuckerberg and other top executives as they met in person with presidents and prime ministers. 

In the memoir, “Careless People,” to be published by Flatiron Books, she alleges that Facebook ignored internal alarms about possible damage to human rights and democracy as it pursued unrelenting growth, including in China, during a crucial period in the company’s history. 

She said in the interview that she was speaking out because she sees Meta repeating the same mistakes. 

“We’re in a moment now where technology CEOs and political leaders around the world are joining forces and compounding their influence, compounding their power, and that’s got consequences for everybody,” she said. “People need to understand what has actually gone on.” 

In addition to the memoir, Wynn-Williams says, she filed a whistleblower complaint last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that Meta misled investors. NBC News has reviewed the complaint. An SEC spokesperson said Friday that the commission does not comment on potential investigations into whistleblower submissions or actions taken in response to them.

Meta criticized the memoir and rejected her accusations. 

“This is a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” it said in a statement. 

The company also accused Wynn-Williams of being “an anti-Facebook activist.” Since she left Facebook, she has advocated publicly for the company’s shareholders to adopt new policies regarding sexual harassment and China. 

“Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books,” the company said. 

Through her attorney, Wynn-Williams said Meta was “trying to mislead the public” through its statements about her and the book.  

In anticipation of the book, Meta filed an emergency request for a hearing before an arbitrator Saturday, arguing that Wynn-Williams had violated a nondisparagement agreement and seeking “injunctive relief barring disparagement.” Jonathan Cohn, a Meta lawyer, wrote in a letter to the publisher, Flatiron Books, on Friday that the book’s marketing suggested it would contain “overheated, false, and potentially defamatory allegations,” and he asked for a chance to make revisions. 

Flatiron Books defended its process, saying in a statement: “This book is a first person narrative account of what the author herself witnessed. We thoroughly vetted the book. We have no obligation to give Meta or anyone else the opportunity to shut down her story.” It also accused Meta of trying to “institute a gag order to silence our author.” 

A person who appears in the book, former Meta spokesperson Debbie Frost, broadly criticized its contents Sunday on the Meta-owned social media app Threads, saying that “a bunch of the stories are exaggerated or just didn’t happen.” A second Meta employee who worked with Wynn-Williams, Tessa Lyons, now an Instagram vice president, said on Threads that the book was “dishonest and distorted.” 

The book chronicles what Wynn-Williams describes as Zuckerberg’s halting evolution from a software-focused engineer and political novice into an executive who micromanaged content moderation decisions about far-flung countries and considered his own run for president. Wynn-Williams cites firsthand experience from meetings and quotes from strategy memos, emails and dozens of other corporate documents, many of which she provided to NBC News. 

The book is being published two months after Zuckerberg promoted Kaplan to be Meta’s chief liaison to the Trump administration and other governments. Kaplan was White House deputy chief of staff for former President George W. Bush. 

In 2016, as part of an email chain about Wynn-Williams’ U.S. citizenship test, Kaplan asked her whether the test included the phrase “dirty sanchez,” a sexual slang phrase and racial slur, according to the book and a copy of the email seen by NBC News. 

Wynn-Williams also described Kaplan’s asking her after childbirth “where are you bleeding from?” and telling her at a company event that she looked “sultry.” She writes that she considered Kaplan’s behavior to be inappropriate and that she believed the investigation in 2017 was unfairly turned back on her. 

A member of Wynn-Williams’ family, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions, said in an interview Sunday that they remember Wynn-Williams telling them in 2017 about the “bleeding” question and the “sultry” comment. This person said Wynn-Williams was uncomfortable at the time with Kaplan’s behavior. 

Meta said in its statement Sunday that the investigation “determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.” Meta said the investigation involved 17 witness interviews over 42 days and that the company reviewed every document she provided. 

Kaplan did not respond to requests for comment.

Wynn-Williams writes that she was also uncomfortable with how Sandberg crossed what Wynn-Williams considered professional boundaries. Sandberg, the company’s No. 2 executive, has been heralded as a champion of women, especially women in business, because of her success and her 2013 book, “Lean In,” and she has advocated a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment. Sandberg wrote a second book, “Option B,” after her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly in 2015. 

According to Wynn-Williams and the SEC whistleblower complaint, Sandberg repeatedly insisted that she join Sandberg in sharing a bed on a private jet as they traveled from Davos, Switzerland, to California in January 2016. Wynn-Williams, who was pregnant at the time, writes that she considered the demand to be inappropriate and mortifying and that she refused. She writes that Sandberg resented her refusal and told her at the end of the flight, “You should have got into bed.” She writes that, later, she felt marginalized by Sandberg at work. 

A person who was on the plane said in an interview Sunday that they recall everyone on the plane, including Sandberg and other staff members, encouraging Wynn-Williams to get some sleep. This person said they did so because Wynn-Williams was visibly pregnant and they were concerned about her health, not for any other reason. This person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also said they recall the plane as having multiple beds. 

Another person who knew Wynn-Williams at the time, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Wynn-Williams told them about what happened on the plane not long afterward. 

In the book and in the SEC complaint, Wynn-Williams writes that Sandberg further created an uncomfortable working environment when she instructed a different employee to purchase $13,000 worth of lingerie for Sandberg and the employee. NBC News has reviewed copies of those emails. The employee declined to comment. 

Sandberg, through her family foundation, declined to comment on the memoir. She stepped down as Meta’s chief operating officer in 2022 and left the company’s board of directors last year. 

Wynn-Williams is the latest whistleblower to emerge from a decade of scandals at Meta involving the company’s impact on elections, violent polarization, teenage mental health and privacy. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, testified before Congress in 2021 after she released documents showing internal dissent over company policies. 

The memoir lands at a sensitive time for Meta as it stares down regulators around the globe. The company is locked in antitrust fights in the United States, with the European Union and in India, while Zuckerberg has pivoted Meta’s politics to the right to align more closely with President Donald Trump. 

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is pouring vast sums of money into the international race to develop artificial intelligence — a contest that also involves China.

Wynn-Williams arrived at the company in 2011 as it was making its debut on the world stage. The Arab Spring protests fueled in part by social media had just begun, and Facebook did not have established relationships with most governments or international organizations. The scrutiny Facebook would receive for inflaming tensions that contributed to massacres in places such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka was still years away. 

Her background fit what Facebook lacked: A native of New Zealand and a lawyer and a diplomat by training, she had worked for the New Zealand government at its embassy in Washington and at United Nations headquarters in New York. 

But while she joined the company with optimism about its mission, she said, the choices made by executives, including Zuckerberg and Sandberg, eventually soured her. 

“They really could have chosen to do it all differently and fix so much of what’s been destructive about Facebook,” she writes. Instead, she calls the app “an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes.” 

Wynn-Williams writes that persuading Zuckerberg to meet international leaders was a challenge. A night owl who preferred wearing T-shirts, he would rarely take meetings before noon and did not want to wear clothing appropriate for the occasions, she writes. Asked at one point whether he wanted to meet the prime minister of New Zealand, Wynn-Williams says, Zuckerberg brusquely dismissed the idea — not realizing the politician was standing next to him. 

In the memoir, Wynn-Williams describes Zuckerberg as fumbling his way through various encounters: getting snubbed by the prime minister of Canada, refusing to prepare before he met the president-elect of Indonesia, arriving late for an event with the president of Colombia, ad-libbing part of a speech to the U.N. General Assembly and getting turned down when he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to name his unborn child. 

“Initially, he would not want a briefing longer than a text message,” Wynn-Williams said in the interview. But by the end of her tenure, she said, “he couldn’t get enough information about politics and how it worked.” 

More recently, Zuckerberg has rarely appeared in public with world leaders. Though he attended Trump’s inauguration in January and hosted a party to celebrate the event, he is more likely to be seen with mixed martial arts fighters or famous musicians. 

The book includes anecdotes that Wynn-Williams says show snippets of Zuckerberg’s personality, gathered while she traveled with him: his belief that Andrew Jackson was the greatest American president, his interest in collecting wine from the Jackson era in the 1830s, his desire to have a “tribe” of children and his professed ignorance that Facebook employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan. 

“You don’t want to win that way?” she quotes herself asking Zuckerberg during one game. 

“I’m not winning that way,” she says he responded. 

Wynn-Williams writes that she believes many of Meta’s mistakes in recent years could have been avoided. She writes that Facebook failed to act on warnings before 2016 about how politicians were using it to sway voters with half-truths. 

Wynn-Williams says Facebook is defined by “lethal carelessness,” claiming executives failed to respond appropriately to knowledge that Facebook inflamed global tensions and instability. She cites Facebook’s role in fueling ethnic hatred and massacres, including in Myanmar, where Facebook has acknowledged that it failed to take down posts inciting violence even though the posts violated its terms of service. Wynn-Williams said the company had dragged its feet for years on hiring staff members to help moderate content from Myanmar, the site of what the U.N. calls a genocide.

The memoir goes into depth about a major question that hung over Facebook at the time: whether it would do business in China, where the government had banned its apps as part of its vast system of censorship. Facebook called its multiyear effort, starting in 2014, to persuade the Chinese government to allow the use of their apps “Project Aldrin,” after astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Various parts of the effort — including the building of China-specific censorship tools — have leaked over time.  

Wynn-Williams cites or quotes from dozens of internal records about the project, some of which were reported Sunday by The Washington Post. 

She writes that Zuckerberg committed to the idea of re-entering China in 2014 because he wanted to grow Facebook’s user base, and she writes that Facebook had little regard for the concessions it would need to make to the Chinese government. 

“There’s no acknowledgment at all of the moral complexity of working in an authoritarian country that surveils its own citizens and doesn’t allow free speech,” she writes. 

“China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle,” she adds. 

In a series of Slack screenshots seen by NBC News, Facebook employees in 2017 discuss building specific tools to present to China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China. The employees discuss tests they could perform for the regulators to build trust in Facebook’s ability to run content-blocking tools. 

Their work is echoed in several other internal documents, seen by NBC News, that include Facebook employees discussing the specifics of what they are building to show the Cyberspace Administration. Facebook employees spoke with Chinese regulators about how a censorship system could work and about what Facebook needed to do to win approval to release its apps there, according to the book and documents seen by NBC News.

Wynn-Williams says that the next year, when U.S. lawmakers asked Facebook about its China plans, the company shared less than it knew. Facebook submitted unsigned written testimony in 2018 to three Senate committees saying it was “not in a position to know” how China would seek to apply its laws to a theoretical Facebook China service — without mentioning its years of research and negotiations. 

Zuckerberg said in 2019 that he had largely given up the idea of operating apps in China, saying in an address about free expression that Facebook and China “could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.” 

But Meta does make huge amounts of money from China. Meta said last year that, in 2023, 10% of its revenue came from China-based advertisers trying to reach people who use Meta’s apps — a figure that equals about $1 billion a month. 

About The Author

Stephen Collopy

See author's posts