Google Paid Rs660 Crore To Its Sexual Misconduct Employee

Last November, The Information discovered Andy Rubin’s embarrassing secret. The “Father of Android” left the firm in 2014, but the secret was found out due to sexual misconduct accusations.

Now it’s likely that Google gave him a reward for this.

The Android creator was alleged for committing multiple sexual misconducts while he was at Google. In 2014, an investigation resulted in Larry Page, Google co-founder, to order Rubin to resign. However, rather leaving him on his own, Google gave a big exit package to him, as reported by The New York Times.

In 2013, Google was forced to conduct an investigation into an issue, in which Rubin was accused of threatening and ordering another employee to perform oral sex on him in a hotel room. The investigation’s results obviously indicated that the accusation was true, so Page decided to let Rubin go. Nevertheless, Google was reported to give Rubin an exit package worth $90 million, the last $2 million of which will be paid next month.

Well, there’s more. According to an investigation in 2014, it was reported that Google offered "a stock grant worth $150 million" to Rubin. That was given as an encouragement for Rubin to stay with the firm after leaving the Android team for focusing on robotics. Since conducted secretly, it was unsure whether Larry Page or any other leaders knew about the investigation.

But they certainly knew about the investigation when presenting him an exit package of $90 million worth. Rubin was even allowed to delay paying back $14 million that he owed the company to buy a beach estate in Japan. The worst thing is, when announcing the news, Page praised Rubin publicly.

About Rubin, he kept on denying the sexual misconduct accusation, referring to the report “wild exaggerations”. Rubin said that the package was included in a smear campaign since he’s involved in a troublesome divorce and a custody battle. Earlier this year, Rubin’s wife filed a divorce, just some months after his sexual misconduct at Google was revealed by the Information.

However, Google’s reaction is what’s really interesting. On the exact day when NYT story came out, Sundar Pichai – Google CEO, and Eileen Naughton – VP of people operations, sent out an email that did not deny anything part of the story. In fact, they refer to the story as “difficult to read”, and they preferred speaking about what Google has done to make women feel safer. They pointed out that they sacked 48 people for accusations of sexual harassment over the past two years, especially none of them received an exit package.

In spite of Google’s actions, the story claims that the firm is under no obligation to present Rubin an exit package. The New York Times also mentioned other leaders who were accused of sexual harassment. Instead of just firing them as it should have, Google protected their public image and gave millions of dollars to those sexual predators. All Rubin had to do is not to work for a competitor company and not to disparage the company publicly.

As the NYT story goes on, it points out that the incident in 2013 was not the only case. It seems that Rubin met his ex-wife at Google; however, while he was married to her, he dates other women at the firm. The divorce filing of Rubin’s ex-wife also reveals a lot more details about him.

She declared that he paid other married women hundreds of thousands of dollars to have “ownership relationships” with them. An email sent by Rubin in 2015 to a woman was captured saying, that she would be being to be taken care of and:

In its response to NYT, Google is likely to have learned nothing, it said that it conducted investigations and took action, including termination. The company added that in recent years it has dealt with inappropriate conduct by authority people in a severe way. And that it is spending effort on improving the way it tackles this sort of behavior.