A year after the revelations, the time for action has come. The Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vidéo union filed a complaint against Ubisoft at the end of the week with the Bobigny court on grounds of sexual harassment, moral harassment and attempted sexual assault.
A complaint which targets not only the Ubisoft group as a legal person, but also ten natural persons within the company including Yves Guillemot, CEO, and Cécile Cornet, former director of human resources.
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At stake, a case law for “institutional sexual harassment”
The complaint filed in the criminal court by master Maude Beckers, representative of the Solidaires Informatique union as well as several victims of Ubisoft, also targets Tommy François, Serge Hascoët, the latter's assistant and several people within the human resources department.
HR is indeed under the fire of numerous criticisms from the victims, who accuse them of having covered up the people accused of sexual and moral harassment. The joint investigations by Liberation and Numérama published in the summer of 2020 had brought to light a real “system” aimed at protecting against winds and tides the “talents” of Ubisoft. Even if they were guilty of the worst.
In its press release, the Solidaires Informatique union also invites “all those who have been victims of the Ubisoft group to join this action”, which aims not only to demand accountability from the company, but also to introduce the notion of “ institutional sexual harassment”, unprecedented in Spanish law. “All these women describe widespread environmental harassment, so present that it destroys the working conditions of women in the company”, explains Me Beckers to Mediapart. "The situation was known to management, tolerated and even institutionalized: despite their obligation to protect their employees, several members of the human resources department refused to act, because Ubisoft wanted above all to retain the men it saw as " talent”. »
Read also:Lucid, Ubisoft believes that the toxicity of its studios risks causing it to lose its “talents”
#HoldUbisoftAccountable
This filing of a complaint is relaunching the #HoldUbisoftAccountable campaign in which players, players, employees and employees of the video game industry, as well as simple observers of the community, have been participating for many months. A hashtag to hold Ubisoft to account, but above all to no longer let behavior considered toxic within a company that wants to be so open, inclusive and benevolent.
But it is all the more difficult to take Ubisoft seriously since we learned ten days ago that the future opus of Assassin's Creed would be piloted by Jonathan Dumont. A man described as "tyrannical" by people interviewed by the American site Gamasutra, author of an in-depth investigation into working conditions within the Ubisoft Quebec studio.
Asked about this astonishing appointment by our colleagues from Numerama, Ubisoft claims to have "full confidence in the Assassin's Creed teams".
“Ubisoft takes all allegations very seriously and has conducted a series of investigations over the past year with an independent company, which took prompt and appropriate action. »
In a financial document published last week, Ubisoft qualified the facts of harassment in its studios as a “significant risk” in its ability to retain its current “talents” and attract new ones.
