Alphabet’s board of directors has opened an investigation into how executives handled claims of sexual harassment, including Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who has been accused of having relationships with employees, according to a new report.
The board has formed an independent subcommittee to look into complaints about Drummond and others — and has hired a law firm to contact alleged victims, CNBC reported.
Drummond was accused in August of routinely ignoring company rules regarding dalliances with underlings by Jennifer Blakely, who wrote about the affair with her married boss on blogging website Medium.
“David was well aware that our relationship was in violation of Google’s new policy which went from ‘discouraging’ direct-reporting-line relationships to outright banning them,” she wrote at the time.
At the time Drummond admitted “a difficult break-up” with Blakely, but said he takes “a very different view about what happened” and that he revealed the Blakely affair to “our employer at the time.”
He also denied having “started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet.”
The following weekend Drummond quietly married another ex-subordinate identified as Corinne Dixon, who wasn’t reporting to Drummond at the time they married, but who worked in his department when she joined the company in 2006, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Drummond began dating Dixon when she worked at Pinterest between 2015 and 2018, after her initial, nine-year stint at Google, according to Axios.
Google has made headlines for eye-popping severance packages it has given to executives accused of sexual misconduct — including a $90 million golden parachute for Android creator Andy Rubin.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin also made waves when he got romantically involved with the marketing manager for Google Glass — a pet project of his.
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