Activision Blizzard exec who called harassment lawsuit ‘distorted and untrue’ steps down from position
Frances Townsend has assumed an advisory role to the board.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
As reported by theWall Street Journal,ActivisionBlizzard chief compliance officer Frances Townsend has stepped down from her position. While no longer an employee of the company, she will continue to serve its board as an advisor.
The move comes as Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of the company slowly works its way to completion, though not without regulatory hurdles like arecent challenge from a UK watchdog.
Townsend was a controversial figure before joining Activision Blizzard. In the early 2000s, during the invasion of Iraq, she held the position of Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism under George W. Bush.
The Washington Postreported in 2004 that Townsend toured the infamous Abu Ghraib prison during the height of the US military’storturing of prisoners at the facility. According to the Post, an officer at the prison told US Army investigators that Townsend pressured him to extract more and better information from prisoners in his capacity as head of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. Townsend, for her part, denied witnessing abuse of prisoners during her tour.
In July of 2021 close to the outbreak of theActivision Blizzard controversy, Townsendemailed employeesregarding the allegations against the company. She claimed the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit “presented a distorted and untrue picture of [Activision Blizzard], including factually incorrect, old, and out of context stories—some from more than a decade ago.”
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick subsequently assumed responsibility for the content of the offending email. Townsend, however, stepped down from a position sponsoring a women’s network at the company, and laterdeleted her Twitterafter sparking controversy by sharing an article critical of whistleblowers.
According toBloomberg, Bobby Kotick wrote in an email that Townsend “did a truly exceptional job” during her tenure. The WSJ reports that Townsend’s former duties as ethics and compliance officer and corporate secretary are being assumed by her deputies Jen Brewer and Luci Altman respectively.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister’s copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he’s not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.
Devolver has a new label dedicated to making games based on comics, films, TV shows and ‘cult heroes’
Rust dev is bored of paying Unity ‘$500k a year’ to fix its engine and promises that his Garry’s Mod successor won’t hoodwink devs with fees
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
