Trial begins this week at France’s Bobigny Criminal Court for a trio of former Ubisoft executives, according to French news service Franceinfo (Google Translated). Former chief creative officer Serge Hascoët, former vice president of editorial and creative services Tommy François, and former game director Guillaume Patrux face allegations of “moral and sexual harassment” following reports of systemic workplace abuse at Ubisoft that emerged in 2020.
In hearings scheduled to last five days, Hascoët, François, and Guillaume will be tried based on the accusations of six women, three men, and two trade unions. The former executives deny all of the allegations.
Earlier reporting from Franceinfo says that the testimonies allege that François insulted and commented on the appearance of female employees, and repeatedly showed pornography in open-plan Ubisoft offices. François is also being tried for charges of attempted sexual assault after being accused of trying to forcibly kiss a restrained Ubisoft employee at a Christmas party.
Hascoët is accused of workplace sexual misconduct, as well as racist and Islamophobic behavior. A Muslim employee alleges that, following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, she was asked whether she “was planning to join ISIS,” and later found that her computer wallpaper had been changed to images of bacon sandwiches during Ramadan.
Patrux is accused of sexual harassment and workplace intimidation (via The Guardian), which allegedly entailed throwing equipment through offices and at employees, punching office walls, drawing swastikas in a woman’s notebook in a meeting, and lighting a man’s beard on fire.
Testimonies, including those gathered by an internal Ubisoft audit in 2020, also mention Black employees being subjected to racial slurs, women being told that their outfits were “invitations to rape,” and junior male staff members being targeted in games of chase where they were sexually assaulted if caught.
Ubisoft’s internal audit describes an “institutionalized schoolboy environment” and habitual public humiliation, where there was effectively “no HR policy until 2020.” An interviewed Ubisoft manager said that executives operated with impunity, alleging that on one occasion Hascoët and François “simulated spanking while shouting ‘harassment'” in front of Ubisoft’s HR offices.
The three executives deny any wrongdoing. François and Patrux were both dismissed by Ubisoft following the 2020 reports; Hascoët had resigned from the company after the allegations emerged. In 2023, Hascoët and François were among five former Ubisoft employees arrested as part of a Paris Judicial Police investigation.
In 2022, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot rejected criticisms that the publisher had only pursued nominal reforms in the wake of the 2020 harassment allegations against its senior staff. “We have done a lot and I think we are a company that can be proud of itself,” Guillemot said, noting that Ubisoft had “acted quickly in cutting some people’s jobs” while other senior employees had been “appropriately disciplined and given an individualised action plan.”
Ubisoft employee groups and affiliated trade unions have maintained that the publisher’s efforts to correct its company culture have been “carefully limited.”
Through its lawyer, the French videogame workers union STJV—one of two trade unions filing a civil suit against the former Ubisoft executives—says this week’s trial is too limited in scope. At Ubisoft, “omerta has become a management method,” the lawyer said. “This trial should also have been Ubisoft’s.”