Riot Games Finds their CEO Innocent of Wrongdoing, Shockingly

Just the other day, we reported that Alienware, presumably egged on by the fact that Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent was accused of sexually harassing a female co-worker and refusing to promote her until she gave him sexual favors, stopped sponsoring League of Legends pro esports league, the LCS. This was only presumed, however: we don’t actually know for certain why Alienware dropped their sponsorship, but if it was because of the sexual harassment charges, apparently they acted a day too soon: because Riot just announced that after a thorough investigation, they found that their CEO hadn’t done anything wrong.

What a shocking twist.

From a report now published on the Riot Games website:
 

After review of the results of the investigation:

• We concluded that there was no evidence that Laurent harassed, discriminated, or retaliated against the plaintiff.

We have therefore reached the conclusion that, at the current time:

• No action should be taken against Laurent.

That is our recommendation to the Board.

Normally, I’m not really the witch-hunting type: but I can’t help but find these conclusions suspicious for two reasons. The first is that this investigation was run by members of Riot’s board of directors, who despite claiming to have been impartial, can’t have been. And I know Riot knows this, because when they did their own internal audit of their toxic work environment in 2018, they actually paid a third party to do the work. And secondly, Laurent was CEO during the years that Riot Games was overrun with toxic male attitudes, and not only did he do nothing about it until they were called out, he has failed to fire or even reprimand many of the most problematic actors in the aftermath. It’s not hard to imagine he’s got problems, which does make it hard to imagine he’s apparently done nothing wrong.

Years of big companies and their bosses being jerks have conditioned me to take anything like this with an enormous grain of salt. I don’t know if justice has been served today, but it sure feels like it hasn’t.