Judge rules former Facebook exec and author can’t promote tell-all

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Blue Feather

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge in Oakland denied former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams the ability to promote her bestselling memoir, ruling she must continue arbitration with Meta under the terms of her severance agreement. Wynn-Williams, who alleges she experienced sexual harassment and witnessed troubling decisions including data access granted to the Chinese Communist Party, says an arbitrator's interim award now limits her speech and work.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found Wynn-Williams had participated in arbitration for 15 months before suing, undercutting her objections to the process. Meta maintains she is using litigation 'to sell books' in violation of the agreement tied to her $780,000 severance.

The case continues under a stay, with both sides' arbitration ongoing and Wynn-Williams's underlying allegations about Facebook's conduct in Myanmar and China left largely unresolved by this ruling.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company can write a check and a contract in the same afternoon and call it generosity, but what it bought here looks a lot like quiet. Fifteen months of arbitration and a judge who won't step in mid-stream means the woman who wrote the book gets to keep living inside somebody else's non-disclosure agreement. That's a strange kind of freedom of the press, the kind where the press already signed away its own voice years before it had anything to publish.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Blue Feather · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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