Industry
Bobby Kotick is suing Kotaku and Gizmodo for defamation
The former CEO believes both articles defamed him and is seeking protection.
Robert Kotick, former CEO of video game company Activision Blizzard, has filed a defamation lawsuit against media company G/O Media for publishing false news stories about alleged widespread workplace misconduct under his leadership.
During Kotick’s tenure as CEO, Activision Blizzard came under intense scrutiny in 2021 when the California Civil Rights Department began investigating the company for possible sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In December 2023, however, Activision Blizzard and the department reached a $54 million settlement.
The settlement, signed by both parties, stated that “no court or independent investigation has substantiated allegations of systemic sexual harassment” at Activision Blizzard or that the Company’s senior executives “ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.” Under Kotick’s leadership, Activision Blizzard also reached two federal settlements for alleged workplace misconduct: one for $18 million with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which required the CEO to apologize) and another for $35 million with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Despite this, Kotick noted that on March 11, 2024, G/O Media published two articles - one on the video game website Kotaku and another on the science and technology outlet Gizmodo - that repeated the dismissed allegations of workplace misconduct without mentioning that they had already been dismissed.
“Neither article had anything to do with Activision,” Kotick says in the lawsuit. “Both were about rumors that Kotick was interested in buying TikTok. Yet, Kotaku and Gizmodo went out of their way to include withdrawn, false allegations relating to workplace issues which G/O Media knew had been conclusively disproven by numerous investigations… purely for the malicious purposes of causing further harm to Kotick.”
According to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Delaware, Kotick and his representatives repeatedly wrote to G/O Media demanding corrections to the articles. And while the texts were changed to tone down the negative charge (removing phrases like “disgraced” CEO), the executive’s legal representatives do not consider this a sufficient correction, so, as they say in the movies, “they’ll see you in court.”
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