So when the executive’s name unexpectedly popped into #Hot-Topics the morning of May 16th, 2018, employees knew something was wrong. She’d found out about the channel from Erin Grau, the head of people... “I thought, Damn, she’s gonna see us talking about some stupid stuff, but whatever,” recalls a former marketing manager named Emily*. She hoped Korey would at least find the conversations funny.
That hope evaporated the next day when Korey began calling people into a room one by one. There, flanked by the company’s head of people and general counsel, she told six people they were being let go. “You’ve been discriminatory,” employees remember her saying. “... you no longer have a job at this company.” Emily, who is a person of color, was shocked. “That was jarring — three white people telling me I was racist,” she says.