The Truth Behind Sexual Harassment At Blizzard

Hello, it's One Takes Shrier and the Outrage Merchants are at it again. Today's claim is that the allegations of sexual harassment at Blizzard are false and that somehow I made them all up. If you're lucky enough to not be familiar with this world, there are a number of culture warriors out there who tweet all day uh about various agreements whether or not they are true and an attempt to elicit intense emotional reactions from their viewers. Um these people aren't reporters. They don't actually talk to anyone involved or ask questions. They just kind of tweet and post videos, but they do have reach and sometimes bring in large audiences. This is part of a whole ecosystem that just rewards and leads to people getting paid for spreading misinformation on the internet. And normally I just kind of ignore this part of the internet like in the same way that you would ignore someone in Time Square screaming that the world is coming to an end because of gays in the military. But actually today

I did want to address it because I think this is a good opportunity to talk about a very serious very important issue and try to explain it in a way that captures the nuances and complexities of it all. And unlike those squealing cretins, um I actually spend most of my time as a reporter on the day on the phone. Well, I spent all day on the phone with people who are involved in these stories, asking them questions, trying to corroborate their accounts with other people so I can piece together what actually happened. Um, and so today's video that I'm going to talk about is based on two main sources. One is an article that I published in Bloomberg in August 2021 that I'll link in the show notes, and the other is my book, Play Nice, About the History of Blizzard, published in October of 2024. Um, fun fact, the same outrage merchants who are now claiming that I destroyed Blizzard by making up sexual harassment claims have actually spent the last 5 years or so claiming that I kept quiet about sexual harassment claims just to kind of

give you a look at the type of intellect that we're dealing with here. But let's zoom out because I do think this is really worth talking about. Um, so in 2021, July of 2021, the California government uh sued Activision Blizzard for sexual harassment and misconduct. It was a big explosive lawsuit. A lot of the claims, most of the claims really focused on Blizzard, the maker of Warcraft, and Overwatch, and Diablo, and Starcraft. This lawsuit included a lot of salacious details, some of which I subsequently reported were false, but we'll get to that. And it led to this these massive effects for Blizzard and Activision as a whole. It led to protests and walkouts, eventually the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft. One thing, by the way, I won't be talking about is the allegation in the lawsuit that a woman committed suicide as a result of harassment against her because that is very complicated, very tricky. It involves Activision, not Blizzard. It was a woman within Activision, not within Blizzard Entertainment. And there's been a lot of kind of details surrounding that story

that are very hazy and hard to prove. It is very difficult to prove why someone killed themselves or to be able to say that definitively. Her parents, the parents of the women who killed herself, actually filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Activision Blizzard and then took it back, withdrew it. Um, it's really messy. It's not something I'm going to get into because I don't have all of the facts surrounding it because in that case, I wasn't able to talk to the victim involved because unfortunately she has passed away. She has died by suicide. I'm going to focus on the stuff that I can prove and corroborate and the people that I've actually talked to. So, okay, two years after this lawsuit started by the Activision Blizzard had become part of Microsoft in December of 2023, uh, California and Activision settled for $54 million. Um, this was after the Microsoft deal had closed, so no longer run by the same people, different kind of entity, and that settlement was likely a whole part of of that. Um, and uh, many of the women who worked for Activision Blizzard at various and during during time periods that were uh,

kind of included in the lawsuit got checks as a result result of that. Sometimes significant checks, checks in the five figures. Um, and the language of the settlement, including the following. I'm going to read this uh, entire thing. Quote, "No court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment in Activision Blizzard. that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination, or that Activision Blizzard's board of directors, including its chief executive officer, Robert Kodic, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct. So, that language is at the core of this week's outrage merchant argument that the whole thing was [ __ ] Um, this happened three years ago, but I guess the culture warriors only discovered it now, which again shows you the kind of intellect we're dealing with here. But look, I'm I'm not going to talk about them anymore. I'm going to talk about the truth of what actually happened at Blizzard because despite the language in this settlement, um, there were a lot of

women who spoke out about their experiences and I can share some of their stories. Um, so first of all, by the way, there were there were actually two lawsuits, a state lawsuit and a federal lawsuit. And this settlement was only for one of them. The state one, the federal lawsuit was settled for $18 million and did not have the same language. Did not say anything like that like the California did. Um there's actually part one of the reasons this is al so also messy is that the state investigators and federal investigators got into political squables. Um and there's a whole lot of details involving uh Gavin Newsome and accusations about him interfering in this that I'm not going to get into here. But um if you're interested in the legal drama, there's a little bit more there that uh uh you can you can find online here and there. And parts of that have still not been quite told. That story still isn't 100% clear of how all that went down, but I think that might help uh explain why there's still a couple of questions surrounding um the the lawsuits of it all. But let's put that aside. Let's look at all the

actual facts. And I think one thing that's really important here, if you've watched my other videos, you know this, but often times when you try to reduce a story to a binary of like, is it true, is it not true, um especially a story that's as complicated as allegations of widespread harassment and cult a culture of of misconduct and and sexual discrimination. That really does a disservice to a reality. Reality is more nuanced and more complicated than that because actually two things in this case are simultaneously true. One is that the California lawsuit was misleading and full of inaccuracies. Um, you can write anything in a lawsuit here in the United States and that one had a lot of things wrong. The other thing that's true is that many of the women who have worked for Blizzard over the last few decades have felt mistreated by the company. And I think that it's important to note that harassment is one thing. I think any company that reaches a certain size that gets into the thousands or tens of thousands is going to have incidents of harassment. It's really how the company

chooses to deal with that harassment and the harassers themselves that creates a culture. So, okay. So, back in 2021, California lawsuit dropped. I did what any reporter would do. I started making phone calls. Before this, I had kind of I heard a few details, a few anecdotes here and there, but not enough to actually be able to publish a substantial story, which one day down the road, I'll do a video about how I make stories and what you kind of need the threshold of proof that you need to actually be able to do a story, but it wasn't enough at that point. So now the floodgates were open. Um, people were open to sharing their experiences. People were going at social media talking about their experiences. At the time, for this Bloomberg story that I published, I spoke to about 50 current and former employees. And the reality, of course, was nuanced. I mean, for starters, Blizzard was a massive organization with thousands of employees and dozens of divisions, and your experiences there would be drastically different depending on where you worked and who you worked with. The Overwatch team had a different culture than the Diablo team, and nothing was quite like the Battleet team. I'll get to that. And of course, Blizzard in the 1990s was

very different than Blizzard in modern times. If you want to read about the old days, a lot of that is in play nice. For now, let's focus on the modern times. Some women said, "Hey, I had very positive experiences at Blizzard." Others said they were harassed frequently and felt discriminated against. Many women told me that it working at Blizzard was kind of a paradox for them. This was a very common theme. This is a place where they had some of the best times of their lives, met some of their closest friends, people who they got married to or were in their wedding parties who they they're lifelong friends. Yet, it was also a place that felt like it didn't treat men and women equally. and working at Blizzard kind of trying to wrap your head around that paradox where it's kind of some of the best times of your life and some of the worst times in your life. Often for stories like this, the people involved want to stay anonymous and many of them did, but actually some were willing to speak on the record about their experiences and are quoted by name in my reporting. So I can give you specific names and accounts from these women. Um there was Sher Scarlet who told me for a Bloomberg story that

she was groped at holiday parties. Um there's Nikki Brick who uh told me that um a bunch of things, but one one anecdote that she told me is that um a person she worked with uh looked at her and said, quote, "Her ass looks great in those shorts and as a result of that, she never wore shorts into the office again. She told me about various times where she complained about things to HR and nothing was ever done about it." Um, I spoke to Connie Griffith who told me that in executive meetings when she was an executive assistant at the time, she would hear some of the top men at the company complaining about hiring women, saying, "If we hire these women, we got to be more careful around them." Um, Brick and many of the other women who worked for Blizzard told me they compared their salaries to male colleagues and found that they were paid less even when they had the same or even more experiences. Um, uh, in fact, Rodri's husband, uh, actually wound up like leapfrogging her at the company. They both both worked for Blizzard and wound up making more over his time there despite the fact that she had more experience at Blizzard than he did. Six

different women for the Bloomberg story um and even more later on told me about incidents where they were harassed by men. They went to HR, reported those incidents and HR did nothing. Even there there's a little bit of nuance because sometimes HR might actually take disciplinary actions against men but not tell the people who reported it. That itself is kind of a problem, but there are ethical and legal complications there. Regardless, those women came away feeling like nothing had been done. They still had to see some of those same men every day. Sometimes it was their bosses. Sometimes it was people who were above them. It contributed to this feeling overall among women, and this is a common theme that I've heard that their issues were not being addressed. And then there was Battlelet. Battleet uh Battleet, if you're not familiar, Battleet is a service that Blizzard uses to um sell and distribute their games online. And there was a big battleet department that incorporated it was kind of like the tech department, IT department. It had all these reor exchange names all the time. But under a guy named Ben Kilgore, who was the chief

technology officer, it felt like a frat house. People would take shots during meetings and vomit in trash cans. I swear to God, I heard all sorts of crazy stories about these hazing rituals that people had to go through. Alcohol was such a big problem at Blizzard and overall, but especially in the battleet department, that the company actually temporarily banned drinking at holiday parties at one point and then later said um it was instituting a two drink minimum at these parties because people would just kept kept getting drunk and causing problems and driving drunk and alcohol was just everywhere. It was a real problem. Ben Kilgore who ran the tech department. In fact, he was the chief technology officer. In fact, he was being lined up as the successor to Mike Morheim, the CEO of the company. He was going to be the next CEO of the company, was then fired in 2018 after an investigation into his behavior and allegations surrounding him sleeping with subordinates. Um, he was actually fired for lying to the investigators. According to people who uh know what happened, were familiar with the investigation. Um, the lawsuit, I think

it actually missed a lot of important parts of Blizzard's culture that I've explored in my reporting, like the lack of boundaries between professional and personal lives at Blizzard. One, call it a quirk of Blizzard was that many of the executives there were either dating or married to lower level employees, which led to a lot of uncomfortable situations. Um, from the CEO and multiple people in the seauite on down. Um, I mean, for example, imagine if you have an issue with uh with someone and turns out they're married to the person who runs Blizzard. What do you do about that? Or like one of the top executives at Blizzard. What do you do about that? Um, another quirk, and I mentioned this in in the book, is that um several Blizzard employees were open swingers and would have sex parties that they would invite colleagues to. Um, this stuff, I mean, a lot of these people, it was it was consensual. It was not something that was um uh people I I didn't hear any stories about people feeling like they were forced to do any of this against their will, but still it contributed to this environment where

again it just felt like there was no boundary between personal and professional lives. By the way, Blizzard is based in Irvine, California. And a lot of people moved to Irvine for this job to work at Blizzard. And so their professional and personal lives wound up intertwined because all of their friends and the people they made and the people they met and hung out with worked for Blizzard. So, just kind of quirks of the culture that I think contributed to a lot of um uh the problems that women felt like they had to deal with. And then there's the Cosby suite, which has become a lasting sign of Blizzard's debauchery. Um this idea of this hotel suite that was dedicated to alleged rapist Bill Cosby. Um, it all started in the California lawsuit which said, I'm going to quote, uh, Afrabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the Crosby suite after alleged rapist Bill Crosby. Um, quick side note, the fact that they call it Bill Crosby, I think just kind of shows you how sloppy the lawsuit was in

general. But still, let let's get into this. By Afraabi, uh, they are referring to a guy named Alex Afrabi, who was a company veteran. He was the top director on World of Warcraft for a while and he was also infamous at Blizzard as someone who was accused of wrongdoing by multiple women but still managed to stick around. Um for Play Nice about a dozen people nearly a dozen people who were interviewed for the book told me that they had either experienced seen or heard about sexual harassment conducted by Afrabi. Um but let's talk about the the the Cosby suite or the Crosby suite. Um, I'm going to tell you a story from Michelle Marorrow, who is an actress and writer who worked with Blizzard, who was connected with Blizzard, would often do hosting stuff for BlizzCon and interviews on camera, that sort of thing. And this this story is published in Play Nice. It's it's something that I um reported out over the la the few years leading up to the book's publication. So, it's BlizzCon uh in the fall of 2013, and Michelle Marorrow is out to dinner with Dave Kosak, who is a

designer on World of Warcraft, and his wife Crystal Kosak. Um, Alexavi drunkenly stumbles over and according to Michelle Marorrow, he starts hitting on her. Now, just to give you a little insight into the reporting process, when I hear a story like this, I will always try to talk to everyone was there. So, Avery declined to comment, but Dave Kosak confirmed all of the details that Maro shared and and said backed all this up, corroborated this stuff. So, Maro tells me, I'm going to quote from Michelle Marorrow. He told me if I married him, referring to Afraabi, he told me if I married him, I'd have the keys to Blizzard, whatever the [ __ ] that means. So, this is going on for a little bit. Eventually, Dave Kosak takes Afraabi, guides him away from the table. Kind of a tough thing to do because Afraabi is Kosak's boss at the time. Um, the next night, still Blizzcon, they are all going to a party at Afrabi's hotel room, which everybody called the Cosby suite. Um, this is 2013. This had uh this was happening according to um quite

a few people I've talked to who were involved with this because of an inside joke that had started a few years back when the carpet in one of their previous hotel rooms at another hotel looked like Bill Cosbyy's sweater. And so they made it into a joke. They would bring pictures of Bill Cosby and they turned it into a whole thing about the Cosby suite. There must always be a Cosby suite, they would say. And on this group chat, Kosak writes that he's quote gathering the hot chicks for the cause. This is uh a group chat with him, Afraabi, and a few other Warcraft designers. Now, when Kosak says he's gathering the hot chicks, he's referring to Michelle Marorrow and his wife in kind of a joking way. And Maro uh confirmed this as well. So, Maro tells me uh we'll get to the group chat in a sec, but so we're remember we're at Blizzcon. They're all going up to the hotel room. They're all going up to the Cosby suite, right? Maro tells me they get to the Cosby suite that night. She again has to fend off unwanted advances from Afrabi, but the night is otherwise uneventful. It's just kind of another Blizzcon party. So, a year later, October 2014, a stand-up comedian named

Hannibal Burus does a routine where he makes some jokes about Bill Cosby that resurface old rape accusations and wind up setting off this firestorm of new allegations and criminal proceedings. Dave Kosak tells me that at the time he joked to his wife, I guess we won't be calling it the Cosby suite anymore. But then in 2021, the lawsuit hits and the gaming website Kotaku shares a photo of a bunch of Blizzard employees, including Dave Kosak, gathered in front of this frame picture of Bill Cosby in the suite. This picture at the time in 2013, before these uh allegations were widely resurfaced and before a lot of people knew about them, seemed harmless. It seemed harmless in 2013, but now in 2021, after all of the the trials and allegations and um accusations, totally horrifying. Um, by the way, in case you're wondering, I I worked at Kotaku, but I left in 2020. This happened, this all happened a year later. This article was published a year after I had left Kotaku. Um, the article also publishes a screenshot of the group text. And the

way they're able to get a screenshot of the group text and also this photo is that this was all published on Facebook. I believe it was on Alex Efciab's Facebook at the time. So this is not something that was like some big hidden secret or leaked or anything. This is something they had published on Facebook because again at the time it was not something that you would see a bunch of picture like you would not see a group of people in front of a frame photo of Bill Cosby and think anything was a because it wasn't until a year after all this happened that the idea of Bill Cosby being an alleged sex offender became ingrained in everybody's heads. So the article publishes the screenshot of the group text. The article doesn't really mention that the Bill Cosby allegations only resurfaced a year before the photos were taken. And it also doesn't mention that the group text referred to Dave Kosak's wife and Michelle Marorrow. And so I spoke to Michelle Marorrow about this. Michelle Marorrow was really pissed that Kotaku had published this. She felt like it was totally taken out of context even though it was referring to her. And she felt

like it was like it was it was not right. Um here's a quote from her in the book. quote, "It was just surreal. Everyone was being unknowingly offended for me as the subject of this text when Dave Kosak is the one who protected me and did exactly what any man should do when their boss is being a creep." After the Kotaku article hit, Dave Kosak, who had left Blizzard and was now working at as a creative director at Deviation Games, was fired. I also spoke to a guy, a designer named Paul Kazarez, who was um also in the photo. He was working at Zanamax online studios and he was fired from his job there shortly after the Kotaku article went live. He told me actually that he felt like this photo has disrupted his career despite the fact that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing. All he did was appear in a photo with a frame picture of Bill Cosby a year before allegations of Bill Cosby's rape were widely resurfaced and set off a firestorm in the press and in United States culture. And let me quote

Michelle Maro again. She said, "I can't speak of anyone for sorry, I can't speak for everyone else's experiences, but when I was in that room, there was nothing nefarious except for Alex. Other women and men that I've talked to who were at this Cosby Sweet party in 2013 said the exact same thing. Alex Ephrai being a drunk kind of creep in their view. Um, nothing else going ary." Um, that's not to say there weren't other issues at Blizzcon because Blizzcon, I think, was known as a place where a lot of Blizzard employees would get drunk and sometimes there would be wrongdoing and bad behavior. But in this particular case, it was just him, according to Michelle Marorrow and other people. So, here's the thing about this story. It also, despite the fact that it became this this wrong incorrect symbol of Blizzard's debauchery that everybody got wrong, Kotaku and then all of the other all the other websites that kind of followed it. Um, worth noting, we at Bloomberg at the time pointed out that it was referring to the the sweater and that it was not kind of a suite

dedicated to a rapist. But besides the fact, um, the story actually did capture a real problem at Blizzard, which is that everybody seemed to know about the behavior displayed by Alex Afrai, but nobody did anything about it. And it wasn't until the spring of 2020, 7 years after that, that Arazzy was fired from Blizzard for what a spokesperson later called quote misconduct in his treatment of other employees. So he was eventually fired. Took a very long time. So what do we make of all this? Um I want to reiterate many things are true at once. And I think one of the biggest problems behind this kind of world of Twitter misinformation is how everything just gets reduced to these sound bites and people just don't seem to have room in their heads for nuance. Many things are true at once. One is that the California lawsuit was misleading and full of inaccuracies. Another is that the lawsuit was that lawsuit was settled for $55 million and the language of the settlement said that no court or

independent investigation had substantiated the allegations. But a third thing that's true is that many, many women have spoken out about having negative experiences at Blizzard with harassment and discrimination and misconduct. And they've spoken to me. They've spoken to other reporters. There were other stories that hit after that lawsuit. They've spoken up on social media. They've talked to friends. They've posted in group chats. They've written on game development forums. They have talked about this extensively. The thing that people don't seem to understand a lot of the times, especially in the gaming world, is that life is not Phoenix, right? There's no binaries. There are no uh contradiction, not can't be right. Stories about sexual harassment, especially a lot of stories, but especially stories about sexual harassment, are always going to be messy, complicated, and nuanced. And I think in this case, it's clear, and I've talked to enough people to substantiate this, that there were very real problems at Blizzard. Even Mike Moheim, the

founder of the company, co-founder of the company and CEO for many years, apologized for what had happened at Blizzard after the lawsuit hit. He spent days on video calls talking to his former employees. There were a lot of people who accused him of knowing about some of the problematic people at the company, many of whom I haven't mentioned here, but Alex Afrai is just one of many people across Blizzard who have been accused of wrongdoing, some of whom were fired after the lawsuit hit. Um, and after after this all went down, he actually wrote a long statement and he said, "Look, to the Blizzard women who experienced any of these things, I am extremely sorry that I failed you." All right, I'll see you all next time.