Spotify is facing a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court on September 19th by Hong Perez, a former sales executive, claiming gender discrimination, equal pay violation, and defamation.
Hong Perez reported that Spotify’s US head of sales Brian Berner excluded women from multiple networking trips to the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and 2017, which she said were referred to internally as “boys’ trips,” as Variety reports. Perez also mentioned “drug use” on each trip and said that one male employee got into a physical fight during one trip.
The lawsuit also affirms that the global head of sales promoted another Spotify executive after receiving warnings for sexual harassment and that the executive took male sales staffers to strip clubs in Atlantic City. Perez also added that the company’s CFO said at a town hall that “he does not care about diversity at the company.”
A representative of Spotify has denied the accusation, reporting: “At Spotify, we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind at any level. While we cannot comment on the specific details of a pending litigation, these claims are without merit.”
