A new lawsuit filed by New York City Employees’ Retirement System has alleged Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick fast-tracked a takeover bid from Microsoft in order to escape liability for wrongdoing following a damning Wall Street Journal report claiming he’d known about sexual misconduct at the Call of Duty publisher “for years”.
Activision Blizzard has faced a relentless stream of shocking allegations relating to its workplace culture since last July, when a State of California lawsuit filing called the publisher “a breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women”. Building on that lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal published a report in November claiming Bobby Kotick had been aware of the allegations of sexual misconduct and mistreatment of female employees across many parts of the company “for years”, but had failed to act on them or tell the board of directors and executives everything he knew.
It’s these claims relating to Kotick’s behaviour that form the backbone of a new lawsuit filed by the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and pension funds, which owns Activision shares. The filing (as spotted by Axios) aims to secure documentation Activision has reportedly so far refused to release so that the plaintiff can carry out an investigation into the board’s “failure to maintain a safe and non- discriminatory working environment for its (specifically minority and female) employees, and failure to take action in response to repeated, grave allegations of misconduct, discrimination, and harassment by Activision’s senior executives.”
The filing says it wants the documentation in order to investigate any wrongdoing by the publisher’s board of directors and to potentially bring a derivative action on behalf of Activision. Citing the Wall Street Journal report among others, the lawsuit specifically singles out Bobby Kotick’s reported awareness of “numerous credible allegations of misconduct by the Company’s senior executives” and his alleged failure to “address them or prevent further offenses” as an example of such wrongdoing, saying it believes Kotick faced a “strong likelihood of liability for breaches of fiduciary duty, together with other members of the Board.”