(Bloomberg) — A former Google employee elaborated on previous allegations about her relationship with a powerful executive at Google parent Alphabet Inc., saying that she was forced out of the company and that he refused to help raise their child.
Jennifer Blakely, who worked in Google’s legal department, posted a detailed account of her involvement with Alphabet Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, claiming he broke company rules about workplace relationships and declined to pay child support for several years after abandoning her and the son they had while they were together. In her post on the blogging site Medium, Blakely alleges that Drummond went years without seeing the child or participating in his upbringing.
“Jennifer and I had a difficult break-up 10 years ago. I am far from perfect and regret my part in that,” Drummond said in a statement to Buzzfeed News, adding he takes a different view of what happened. “Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet.” A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment.
Blakely previously talked about her relationship with Drummond to the New York Times, which published her account in 2018 as part of a broader story on senior Google executives going unpunished for alleged sexual misconduct. Her post on Wednesday goes into greater detail, and could provide more fuel for activists and employees who say the internet-search giant still hasn’t done enough to overhaul a culture in which powerful men were protected even when accused of inappropriate conduct.
Blakely’s original account came out alongside accusations that former Google executive Andy Rubin was given a $90 million payment in 2014, despite the company investigating an allegation of sexual misconduct by a fellow worker and finding the account credible. Rubin has denied wrongdoing. The news sparked protests and a massive employee walkout, and Google eventually responded by ending the practice of requiring workers to sign away their right to bring claims against the company in court.
(Updates with Drummond statement in third paragraph.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at [email protected], Andrew Pollack
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