A woman is good at her job. And she suffers for it.

Meet the woman suing Meta

Kelly Stonelake was hired by Facebook in 2009. It was a dream job. She’d been directly recruited to work at the buzzy tech company by Dave Morin, a co-creator of the Facebook platform. In her role as a marketing specialist she helped to build the platform allowed developers to build their own third-party apps for the site. Remember when Facebook had games? It was that. She also worked setting and enforcing platform policies and regulations, and building operational systems. And she represented the company at events like f8, SXSW, and CES.

The sexual harassment, Stonelake alleges, began her first week of work, with male colleagues taking bets on whether she would break up with her boyfriend. This harassment, and subsequent retaliation for reporting that harassment, continued, Stonelake’s lawsuit says, for the next 14 years.

Meta has not responded to a request for comment.

Kelly Stonelake.

In the lawsuit, filed this month against Facebook, now Meta, Stonelake documents years of targeted sexual harassment, being told she was being denied advancement in the company because it would make her male superiors look bad. But she continued the work, because she loved the work and she believed she could make the company a better place.

But the cycle of harassment, Stonelake says, resulted in the decline of her mental health, leading to suicidal thoughts and eventually her termination in 2023 while she was on a leave of absence to take care of her health.

In an interview, Stonelake told me she felt she had to file the lawsuit, win or lose, so she could hold the company accountable. “I believe that individual action and collective rage is what will save us,” she said over Zoom from her home in Washington State.

This lawsuit, for Stonelake, is the beginning of her individual action. One thing she can do is to try to change the narrative about women in tech, the power of diversity, and one of the most powerful social platforms in the world.

The 31-page lawsuit lays out 14 years of harassment and retaliation. The early bets about her relationship, she says, escalated to attempts to coerce Stonelake into sex by her supervisors, who are only identified by their initials in the lawsuit. She describes one business trip where her male boss accompanied her to her room under the pretense of going over a presentation with her. Once in the room, she says, he tried to kiss her, shoved his hands down her pants and ultimately passed out on her bed. Later, on another trip he told her she’d never get promoted unless she had sex with him.

She eventually transferred campuses to get away from him.

But it didn’t end there. Stonelake continued to be subject to sexist and misogynistic comments from other colleagues and supervisors, she says.

Two moments described in the lawsuit particularly stood out for me. One is a time Stonelake helped the company avoid a $10 billion fine over Meta’s failure to monitor third-party data use, when 50 million Facebook accounts were harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a firm linked to Steve Bannon, which was using the data to target voters. Stonelake’s review that year was glowing.

Her supervisor at the time, who is quoted in the lawsuit, wrote:

“You played a leading role in the Day 545 War Room, a critical company/FTC-level effort… you quickly broke down the issue and ensured these business apps were not impacted… you personally provided first-line support to a huge number of developers... engaging directly with them to address their questions and help them find resolution… this was selfless, scrappy work that had a material positive impact on our partners and set an important example for internal teams…”

But she wasn’t promoted. Her boss later explained “someone had to take the fall” for the mess. And it was her, even though she’d been the one to clean it up.

The second thing that stood out to me was Stonelake’s work on the Horizon World platform, which was being developed as Meta’s Roblox alternative – a multi-layer virtual platform, designed for kids, where users could interact. It was an ambitious project. But when Stonelake joined the program she immediately saw a problem. In a quote sent via email, Stonelake explained, Horizon was “a product where users with Black avatars faced racial slurs within seconds, and children exposed to sexual harassment and bullying were inadequately protected.” It was a virtual world designed for kids, but it wasn’t safe for them.

“Distance has brought perspective, and that perspective has brought shame, shame that I spent so long building something that’s become a force for hate. But that’s exactly how oppressors need us to feel ashamed for our response to their abuse, so we'll be afraid to speak up.”

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Kelly Stonelake

Stonelake’s job was to promote the platform and push it to market. But she couldn’t do that. Not with the safety issues. When she and another female colleague pushed to delay the launch, Stonelake was told to silence her co-worker. When she didn’t, she was cut out of key leadership meetings.

According to the lawsuit, “In January 2023, Ms. Stonelake was explicitly told she would be denied a promotion because documenting her achievements would expose failures by male leaders whose support she needed.”

By reporting a problem that put kids at risk, Stonelake was retaliated against.

It’s a familiar story: A woman does her job well enough that she suffers for it.

And it’s an important story to tell, especially now as the Trump administration moves to roll back all efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration’s narrative is that people who aren’t qualified have been succeeding at the expense of America’s success. But the opposite is true. DEI efforts were, for the most part, merely window dressing on company cultures that pretended to be equitable on their surface, but behind closed doors still had a culture of racism, harassment, sexism, and retaliation.

Now that Donald Trump is in office again, it’s telling which companies are quick to dispense with the pretense. And Meta is one of them.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video announcing the company was no longer enforcing community standards. Meta was, as he put it, going back to its roots in the value of free speech. People could now say or post whatever they liked, not fact checked or hindered, with few consequences.

If Stonelake’s allegations are true, Zuckerberg’s statements about free speech only underscore that free speech is for the worst most vile commenters on his platforms, but not for those who speak truth to his power.

When I asked Stonelake what she’s learned from the experience, she sent me this statement: "Distance has brought perspective, and that perspective has brought shame, shame that I spent so long building something that’s become a force for hate. But that’s exactly how oppressors need us to feel ashamed for our response to their abuse, so we'll be afraid to speak up. Mark Zuckerberg is the one who should be ashamed, ashamed for pretending to care about humanity in order to convince so many really good people to build really harmful products."

• You can read about Kelly’s lawsuit in her own words over on her newsletter

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