Alphabet Chief Legal Officer David Drummond is on the middle of a media firestorm, following a brand new Medium put up authored by a former Google worker who was engaged in a years-long relationship with Drummond greater than 10 years in the past.
Though the extramarital affair was initially reported on final fall by the New York Times within the broader context of Google’s permissive office tradition, the previous worker, Jennifer Blakely, says in a brand new and way more detailed account of their relationship that Drummond was a serial philanderer, leaving his spouse for Blakely, then leaving Blakely and the son that he fathered along with her for an additional now-former Google worker.
She provides that Drummond additionally had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”
We reached out to Google, asking for remark both from the corporate or Drummond, and have but to listen to again.
It’s an enormously unflattering portrait and it comes at a fragile time for Google, which discovered itself on the middle of the #metoo motion final yr, after the Times revealed that one other former government, Andy Rubin, had been awarded a good-looking exit package deal following a sexual misconduct declare that the corporate reportedly discovered credible.
In addition to accusing Drummond of neglecting her, Blakely additionally accuses him of being an absentee mum or dad to the kid who she suggests they tried for years to have, writing that “[m]onths or years would go by where he wouldn’t see [their son] or respond to my calls or texts with updates and pictures of him or even ask how he was doing, let alone how he might help out, knowing full well I was alone and in desperate need.”
Elsewhere in her put up, Blakely says that following a custody battle over the boy that she received when he was four-and-a-half-years outdated, “David began providing ample child support.”
According to a number of sources accustomed to the state of affairs, it’s extra nuanced than Blakely describes and was not a very completely happy union, although these identical people acknowledge that a lot of her account is true. Drummond, who was Google’s common counsel again in 2001 once they met, was married when he started an affair with Blakeley, who’d been employed into Google’s authorized division as a senior contracts supervisor. Though Google merely discouraged managers from having affairs with subordinates on the time (it wasn’t towards the corporate’s code of conduct), when Drummond lastly instructed the corporate in 2007 that Blakeley was pregnant together with his baby, she was moved into a job within the firm’s gross sales division, removed from the corporate’s authorized division.
Blakely writes she had “zero experience in sales” and that it was a tough transition to make: “I did my best to keep up but I was floundering and became depressed at work.”
She left the corporate roughly one yr later, in 2008. She says she and Drummond and their son have been residing collectively by that point, including that seven months later, he broke up along with her by way of textual content, saying he was “never coming back” to their shared residence.
“And he didn’t,” she writes.
Drummond’s star has continued to rise at Google, the place he has now spent 17 years and at the moment serves as its senior vp of company growth, in addition to the chief authorized officer for Google’s mum or dad firm, Alphabet.
Google has made quite a few modifications within the face of criticisms that male executives on the firm haven’t confronted penalties prior to now for sexual misconduct at work — criticisms that boiled into fury final yr, prompting an organized walk-out by tens of 1000’s of Google staff final November.
Among them: Google not power staff to settle disputes with the corporate in personal arbitration, together with in circumstances of sexual harassment or assault; staff can now lodge complaints referring to harassment and different misconduct by way of a devoted web site; an they usually can carry colleagues to assist them to conferences associated to investigations.
Still, Google has…
