Activision-Blizzard has filed a lawsuit against California’s Civil Rights Department (fka the DFEH) alleging that the agency “slow-walked” and “unlawfully redacted” documents the company sought access to in regard to California’s own lawsuit against the studio.
As first reported by Axios, the company that itself stands accused of shredding evidence, discriminating against workers, creating a hostile environment for female and POC workers, and openly busting unions for the last year now claims that in fact it’s the state of California that “deliberately unleashed a hurricane of hostile media coverage against the company based on malicious and knowingly false assertions.”
Worth noting here is that Activision-Blizzard has chosen a combative stance over the California lawsuit specifically from its initial filing way back in July 2021, when the company repeatedly attacked the agency and its investigators, attempting to paint them as “unaccountable State bureaucrats […] driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California” and denying the accusations against the company even as mountains of evidence supporting the the state’s claims multiplied across the gaming industry faster that anyone could cover it. Indeed, Activision-Blizzard has been using these allegations of ethics violations as a cudgel since the fall of 2021, when it became public that attorneys working on the state case had also worked on the federal case, which ABK has since settled.
The company now claims the state’s lawsuit was “unlawfully filed” and asks the courts to force the state to cooperate with ABK’s attempts to prove that it communicated with unions and the media – including the notoriously feminist and pro-labor Wall Street Journal – on what it characterizes as a smear campaign. That was a joke. This is why we can’t have nice things.
