Veteran Google worker leaves company amid alleged retaliation

Claire Stapleton, a longtime Google employee and one of the main organizers of last year’s walkout, announced on Friday that she will be leaving the company amid what she described as “flogging, shunning, and stress” and a campaign of continued retaliation by higher-ups.

Stapleton wrote in an impassioned Medium post that she is leaving Google after 12 years because “the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job.”

“These past few months have been unbearably stressful and confusing,” she wrote. “But they’ve been eye-opening, too: the more I spoke up about what I was experiencing, the more I heard, and the more I understood how universal these issues are.”

Stapleton, who has held multiple positions at Google throughout her tenure, was most recently a YouTube marketing manager. Her decision to leave comes amid a swirling controversy over YouTube’s policies, which came to a head this week over the platform’s handling of a conservative commentator whom a Vox journalist accused of defaming and harassing him.

“Google’s always had controversies and internal debates, but the ‘hard things’ had intensified, and the way leadership was addressing them suddenly felt different, cagier, less satisfying,” Stapleton wrote, describing her experiences over the past year at the company. She did not explicitly mention this week’s wave of YouTube criticism.

Both Stapleton and fellow Google employee Meredith Whittaker were instrumental in organizing the Google walkouts that took place at Google offices around the world last year, with workers railing against the company’s handling of sexual harassment issues as well as general working conditions.

And both women in April circulated internal messages alleging they’d faced months of retaliation from the company over their activist efforts.

Stapleton in the message, first reported by tech news outlet Wired, alleged that she was told that she would be “demoted” and that “a project that was approved was no longer on the table” within months of the walkout.