Tinder has fired its vice president of marketing and communications Rosette Pambakian, as well as multiple employees who sued Tinder’s parent company Match Group and its controlling shareholder IAC earlier this year.
The co-founders of Tinder — Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen — and several other employees brought the lawsuit in August, alleging that the current owners manipulated financial data in order to lower the company’s valuation, denying them millions. The suit also alleged that Tinder’s former CEO, Greg Blatt, sexually harassed Pambakian at the company’s 2016 holiday party.
The Verge first broke the news of the firings. A Match Group spokesperson later confirmed that a number of Tinder employees have been terminated; though they did not identify them or say how many were involved.
Pambakian sent an email to Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg and Tinder CEO Elie Seidman on Tuesday, claiming that after being placed on leave when the lawsuit was filed, she was subjected to “ongoing intimidation and retaliation clearly designed to pressure me into resigning.”
Pambakian also said that after she declined to sign a non-disparagement agreement, “Match snuck an arbitration clause into its employees’ most recent compliance acknowledgements, causing me, Jonathan, James and Josh to have to withdraw from the lawsuit.”
“I never imagined that I’d be pushed out of my company for standing up for what is right,” Pambakian wrote. “But if that is the cost of being on the right side of history, I’ll pay it. As a woman CEO, I truly hope that you reconsider the safety of your remaining female workforce and allow Tinder and other Match owned companies to follow in the footsteps of Uber, Facebook and Google in eliminating forced arbitration for sexual misconduct claims. We deserve better.”
Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco confirmed to CNN Business that a number of employees were terminated for being “unable to fulfill their job responsibilities.” Ginsberg also denied that Pambakian was fired for complaining about sexual harassment.
“As explained in the letter we sent you, you were terminated because it was not possible for you to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of your role as Tinder’s spokesperson for a number of reasons, including your public position against the company over a valuation process,” Ginsberg wrote. “We also recently asked you to come to the office for a meeting with the HR department to discuss work-related activities and policies and were told that we can only contact you through your attorneys. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for you to do your work at Tinder if all communications related to your job have to go through your lawyers.”
