Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/10/google-board-sued-for-90-mill.html
Investors accuse Alphabet’s board of directors of failing their duties.
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“While at Google, Rubin is also alleged to have engaged in human sex trafficking – paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to women to be, in Rubin’s own words, ‘owned’ by him.”
While he could have had his fantasy for free, and without all the lawsuits. God knows there’s enough Fifty Shades of Gray fans out there.
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He sounds like a monster, but was he actually engaged in trafficking or is this another case where a consensual transaction with a sex worker is mislabeled?
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Just because the guy pays the sex worker doesn’t mean everything was consensual. (Even assuming the women were sex workers by choice.)
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Nor does it mean it wasn’t.
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No.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html
FTA:
What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.
Giving money to co-workers and subordinates does not remove their right to say no. Also, don’t solicit your co-workers and subordinates. Seriously. This isn’t rocket science. It’s not even software development. It’s common fucking sense.
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I don’t like to nit pick, but I still feel like I’m missing something from this story. Coercing subordinates into sex is rape, not human trafficking. If I had to guess I’d think the “human trafficking” charge is because it was on a trip to another state or something, and this is the charge that the feds can lay on him (whereas a rape charge would be laid by the state the crime was committed in). But I wonder if there isn’t something even worse happening.
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Excellent point.
I wouldn’t be surprised since, at least according to the article I linked above, some of the charges and settlements remain undisclosed.
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I wondered about this too; unfortunately, my brain went immediately to the ‘hiring’ of specialised, foreign workers, then ‘owning’ them. Much as trafficking is done in distressingly many other countries. 
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Yeah, it’s just me wondering, “As bad as this already is… is it way worse than that?”
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Andy Rubin was/is into some serious power exchange / bdsm stuff. There are articles that print bits of his emails that talk about how women he is involved with are “owned” by him (or words to that effect). It seems from the bits I have read that this was consensual, so there’s that, but it takes a special kind of dumb to bring that kind of thing into the workplace.
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