Google has fired 48 employees over the last two years, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said on Thursday after a New York Times report that the company had protected three senior executives from allegations of sexual misconduct by offering them hefty payouts.
The email, which The Hill reviewed, said that 13 of which were senior executives, but that none had received exit payouts.
“Today’s story in the New York Times was difficult to read,” Pichai said in the opening of his email, which Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of people operations, also signed.
“We are dead serious about making sure we provide a safe and inclusive workplace,” he continued. “We want to assure you that we review every single complaint about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct, we investigate and we take action.”
Pichai also noted that Google updated its internal policies to “require all VPs and SVPs to disclose any relationship with a co-worker regardless of reporting line or presence of conflict.”
{mosads}The New York Times story published on Thursday morning reported that Google gave Android creator Andy Rubin $90 million in severance pay when he left the company in 2014 following a sexual misconduct allegation, despite having no contractual obligation to offer the money.
Google later invested in a venture capital firm Rubin started after leaving the company.
In his email, Pichai did not specifically address Rubin, nor did he deny the New York Times’ reporting.
A spokesman for Rubin denied that he had ever engaged in misconduct and said that “any relationship that Mr. Rubin had while at Google was consensual and did not involve any person who reported directly to him.”
According to a lawsuit filed by Rubin’s wife, he had “ownership relationships” women, paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Harper Neidig contributed.