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Blizzard’s head of HR gets the boot

On Tuesday afternoon it was announced that president of Blizzard, J Allen Brack was stepping down with immediate effect.

But Brack was not the only departure from Blizzard, according to a Bloomberg report, head of human resources, Jesse Meschuk, has also left Blizzard.

The reasons for Meschuk’s departure weren’t revealed by Bloomberg but we suspect that the lawsuit brought by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing has something to do with it.

In that suit, employees who were harassed or experienced Activision Blizzard’s “frat boy” culture and complained to HR were either ignored or confidentiality was breached. This allegedly lead to drastic consequences for employees who dared to speak out.

“After female employees engaged in protected activities, such as complaining to human resources, Defendants took adverse employment actions against female employees. Such adverse employment actions included but was not limited to denial of professional opportunities, negative performance reviews, forced transfers to less favorable units, constructive termination, and selection for reductions in forces/layofs likely based on discriminatory criteria applied to formal and/or informal evaluations,” the lawsuit reads.

According to The Verge, Meschuk has also deleted his Twitter account.

During its second quarter earnings call, Activision Blizzard chief executive officer Bobby Kotick reiterated that the firm would terminate any manager or leader found to have “impeded the integrity of our processes for evaluating claims and imposing appropriate consequences”.

“I want to start by making clear to everyone that there’s no place at our company where discrimination, harassment, or unequal treatment of any kind will be tolerated. Nowhere. We so appreciate the current and former employees who have come forward in the past and recent days with courage,” said Kotick.

This is far from the end of the road in this matter and we suspect that more announcements of departures will be made soon as investigations into the allegations made by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing are started.

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