The chief operating officer quit his job abruptly after an employee demanded “millions of dollars”.
The chief operating officer of the highly successful mobile payments startup, Square, has resigned quite suddenly after having been accused of sexual harassment by an employee who is demanding “millions of dollars” in order to keep the issue from going to court.
Keith Rabois announced this decision online after informing the company of what happened.
Rabois, who has been a senior executive at Square with high regards, caused a rain of tweets from the Silicon Valley community. The executive made his mobile payments company resignation announcement in a lengthy blog post on Tumblr. He explained that his accuser’s New York attorney had contacted him with the demands. The accuser is a male who remained unidentified, but with whom he had been in a relationship at the start of 2010.
The accuser had been recommended for his position with the mobile payments company by Rabois.
Now, that man has stated that he will file a lawsuit stating that they were not in a consensual relationship when they had been together. Rabois did not elaborate any further on the allegations that have been made against him.
In his Tumblr blog post, he explained that “I was told that only a payment of millions of dollars will make this go away, and that my career, my reputation, and my livelihood will be threatened if Square and I don’t pay up.”
Rabois has been trained as a lawyer and used his blog post to explain that he met the accuser three years ago through mutual acquaintances. A number of months after they first met and after they had spent some time together, Rabois made the recommendation to the mobile payments startup to hire the other man, which Square did. The former COO did not mention whether or not that individual is still employed by the company.
He wrote in the blog that “I realize that continuing any physical relationship after he began working at Square was poor judgment on my part.”
The mobile payments company has now retained Richard Curiale, a lawyer from San Francisco, in order to perform their own internal investigation into this issue.
