Two former household employees have filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, alleging harassment and discrimination at their family office, as the Facebook CEO deals with the company's worst crisis in its history.
The employees, who have filed lawsuits against Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, allege that they were subjected to racial and homophobic insults by a top adviser to the CEO, as well as being denied legally mandated work breaks.
Mark Zuckerberg's chief security at the center of lawsuits
The claims of inappropriate behavior against Liam Booth, the chief of Mark Zuckerberg's personal security, are at the center of both lawsuits filed in San Francisco. Booth quit his position in 2019 after the allegations were first made public.
Booth is accused of making racial and gender insults to Mia King, a black household employee, including calling her "ghetto" and suggesting she was only employed because of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's diversity mandate, the Daily Telegraph reported.
According to her claim, he is accused of complaining to her that Meghan Markle, who is half-black, "polluted the royal bloodline." In addition, he is accused of making racial remarks towards Chan.
In late September, another lawsuit was filed anonymously by a former employee named John Doe, who is described as a gay and handicapped household operations manager.
Booth is also accused of grabbing Doe's buttocks and imitating "lewd sex behaviors" in front of Zuckerberg and other staff witnesses at Zuckerberg's Montana ranch in October 2018.
The lawsuits add to the strain on the billionaire father of two, who is now facing allegations from leaked internal Facebook papers about how the business handled disinformation and allegedly kowtowed to authoritarian countries.
According to the lawsuit, several employees had previously observed Booth touching Doe's butt in front of Zuckerberg in Montana. The main home of Zuckerberg and Chan is in the Bay Area, although they also own houses in Hawaii and Montana.
Facebook's CEO and wife alleged allowing discrimination to happen
When Business Insider first revealed the charges, Booth, a former Secret Service agent who formerly served in President Barack Obama's personal protection detail, resigned from Zuckerberg's family office in 2019.
These allegations have been denied by Zuckerberg and Chan, whose personal spokesperson, Ben LaBolt, declared in a statement that the company's internal inquiry found no evidence of misconduct.
In the three years after the claims first appeared, Booth has yet to make a word about them, as per Daily Mail. Doe's boss, Brian Mosteller, and Monica Moorhouse, an ex-human resources staffer for the family office, are also mentioned in the action.
Per NY Post, Booth blamed Chan for a vehicle accident in another instance, "while pushing back his eye lids and noting that Asian women are usually bad drivers," according to the lawsuit. He allegedly used homophobic epithets and a false stutter while speaking about LGBT employees.
According to court documents, King alleges she complained about the problems several times but was informed that "men are in power" at the workplace. In February 2019, she was "terminated" from Limitless. In the lawsuits, Zuckerberg and Chan are mentioned as employers who allegedly permitted discrimination to occur.
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