A former Facebook product manager says Apple fired him shortly after hiring him following an employee protest about allegedly sexist and racist language in his best-selling book Chaos Monkeys.
“I was fired by Apple in a snap decision,” Antonio García-Martínez said Friday afternoon on Twitter. His LinkedIn page says he started working at the Cupertino iPhone and app-store giant last month.
Apple earlier told Reuters in response to questions about his departure that, “Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”
García-Martínez said on Twitter that the company’s statement implied he’d engaged in “negative behavior” while at Apple. “That is defamatory and categorically false,” he tweeted. He did not directly address the allegations by Apple employees about his book. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from this news organization about those claims.
García-Martínez’ exit followed news from technology website The Verge on Wednesday that more than 2,000 Apple employees had signed a petition expressing deep concern about his hiring. The letter, according to the site, focused on García-Martínez’ 2016 autobiography, and cited a number of statements from it.
“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness,” one passage said, contrasting what the author believed of the region’s women against what he saw in a girlfriend who in a “post-apocalypse” would be capable of “carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back.”
On Friday afternoon, García-Martínez said Apple had been “well aware” of his writing before bringing him on. “My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one),” he tweeted.
The petition cited another passage about a different woman, of whom he wrote: “Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.” He also complained that few Facebook employees put their “femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels.” Elsewhere, he described a woman in a meeting at Facebook as needing “more cleavage or more charm.”
The Apple employees accused García-Martínez of both sexism and racism. They cited another passage referring to an engineering manager with a “thick Indian accent” who reminded him of an “auto-rickshaw driver” in India.
Apple employees also took issue with García-Martínez’ description of East Palo Alto, a city with large Latino and Black populations.
García-Martínez said on Twitter that he had until Friday afternoon kept silent about the matter because he wanted to “settle things amicably with the company that I admired, and at which I hoped to build the future of ads privacy.” He said he was speaking out because Apple had spoken publicly about his departure.
Apple had “actively recruited” him for the job on the ads team, García-Martínez said. “I upended my life for Apple,” he tweeted. “I sold my (Washington) residence which I built with my own hands, relocated myself, shut down any public media presence and future writing aspirations, and resolved to build my career at Apple for years to come.”
