A former Google employee claims she was reprimanded for speaking out about sexual harassment

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A former Google employee says that she was harassed repeatedly by her superiors while working at the Mountain View, California, company and that nothing was done to stop it, San Francisco Weekly reports. The employee's allegation is complicated by the fact that she said on Twitter, "I have no proof of any of this."

Business Insider has reached out to Google for comment.

On one hand, this incident is little more than a routine dispute between two individuals that ought not to rise any further than the HR department at Google. However, the broader issue of whether women in tech are discriminated against periodically jumps out in headlines. An allegation at the code-sharing site Github became a global story, for instance, in 2014. 

Kelly Ellis, who now works for the blogging platform Medium, was employed by Google between 2010 and 2014. In a series of tweets sent Saturday, she alleged that during that time she was sexually harassed by a manager and that after she subsequently "poured a drink on him,"  she was reprimanded "instead of him."

She names two Google employees as being involved, Rod Chavez and Vic Gundotra. Chavez told SF Weekly that he barely knew Ellis: "She used to work at Google I believe. She didn't work with me but we worked in the same org." He then said "he would need to check with his superiors if he was able to talk, then quickly hung up."

Ellis worked on Google+, the company's social-networking platform. Gundotra has been described as "the father of Google+," leaving the company in April 2014. (Business Insider also reached out to Gundotra directly to get his side of the story.) 

Ellis says she is not interested in talking to the media, and she doesn't "care if people believe me or not ... I've said what I had to say, now I'm planning to go back to writing code."

The engineer has since made her Twitter profile private, but BuzzFeed News saved many of the tweets:

"You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." -Vic Gundotra, to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.

Vic G to Matt S within earshot of me, on a boat in Maui: "doesn't Kelly look amazing heh heh"

Rod Chavez is an engineering director at Google, he sexually harassed me, Google did nothing about it. Reprimanded me instead of him

"It's taking all of my self control not to grab your ass right now." VERBATIM quote from someone currently an engineering director at Goog

"He feels like you humiliated him in front of his reports." Something HR actually fucking said to me.

The harassment "training" at Goog? Mostly about not getting in trouble. Nothing about respecting humanity of your peers.

Of course, whenever anyone said something that made me uncomfortable, I had to laugh it off. None of this is stuff I ever talked to HR about

I have no proof of any of this. Did I just blow up my career? I hope not.

Ellis has since become a target for harassment by internet trolls. There are discussions about her on the "baphomet" forum of the message board 8chan. "She shouldn't get away with this," one user writes, "can anything be done?" BuzzFeed News reports she has since had multiple people try to break into her social-media accounts, "along with several rape threats."

"This is what happens when women speak truth to power," Ellis wrote on her Google+ page. "Happy International Women's Day."

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Rob Price was a senior correspondent at Business Insider, based in San Francisco. He wrote investigations and long-form features about platforms, people, and power in Silicon Valley.His stories variously led to attorney general investigations, large-scale internal reviews at major tech companies, high-profile personnel departures, citation by state and federal lawmakers, and the closure of a well-funded startup. His 2022 story on the Bitfinex hack is being adapted into a feature film, and in 2024 he received an SPJ NorCal Excellence in Journalism award for his reporting on AI and relationships.Rob's scoops and exclusive stories were cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Politico, The Guardian, Axios, and many other national and international publications. His writing has also been published in or syndicated by The Washington Post, The Independent, Vice, Slate, and elsewhere, and he appeared on CNN, the BBC, CBS, Reuters, ABC Australia, and other broadcast media to discuss technology, business, and culture.He worked for Business Insider from 2015 to 2025. Prior to joining the features team, Rob covered Facebook and Silicon Valley, and before that wrote about tech business, policy, and the gig economy in London. Between September and October 2019, he was acting executive editor for Business Insider's UK bureau. He also sat on the board of directors for the San Francisco Press Club, the leading non-profit media advocacy group in the Bay Area, and was a volunteer crew member at the Marine Mammal Center, the world's largest animal hospital for marine mammals. You can contact Rob Price via email at robaeprice@gmail.com, or +1 650-636-6268 (Signal / WhatsApp / Cell). Selected stories:— They spoke out against their employer. Then they were hit with trade secrets suits.— The rise of 'shadow stand-ins'— App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot— Deel Speed: The inside story of a $12 billion HR startup's breakneck growth— Private islands, flying cars, and psychedelic parties: Inside the wild post-Google lives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin— 'I want your Instagram account': First came the threatening texts, followed by the SWAT teams. Then someone wound up dead.— Inside Iconiq: How Mark Zuckerberg's banker built a secret Silicon Valley empire and made billions— Gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. Now it's a publicly traded Netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the CEO is invading their dreams— A drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.