San Francisco-based virtual reality startup UploadVR, which is now going by Upload, settled a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit yesterday with its former employee. Anonymous sources told TechCrunch that the lawsuit ended, which Upload later confirmed in a statement. No further details about the settlement were provided.
The lawsuit was filed this past May in California by Elizabeth Scott, formerly the director of digital and social media at UploadVR. The suit says that female colleagues were treated like “second class citizens” in corporate conversations, and that a manager would repeatedly make comments about the plaintiff’s body. The lawsuit claimed that others at UploadVR would continuously discuss a certain employee’s sexual exploits. The plaintiff also named unfair pay compared to her male colleagues and wrongful termination as other instances of gender discrimination.
UploadVR was founded in 2015 by Taylor Freeman and Will Mason to be a co-working space for developers as a result of the growing interest in VR following Facebook’s acquisition of OculusVR. It hosts VR parties and runs a VR industry news site of the same name.
Upload responded to a request for comment by linking back to a letter from their COO, Anne Ward, in which she says, “Above all else I want to make it clear that Upload is a place where everyone is welcome. Everyone. We will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, gender expression, disability or sexual orientation.”
