Former chief creative officer Serge Hascoët and four other former Ubisoft employees have been arrested over sexual harassment allegations.
As reported by the French newspaper Libération (spotted via GamesIndustry.biz), five former Ubisoft employees, including at least two former senior executives, have been arrested in France after an investigation into sexual assault and harassment inside the games publisher lasting over a year.
Those arrested include Serge Hascoët, Ubisoft’s former chief creative officer. Libération published a report in 2020, shortly before Hascoët left Ubisoft, in which an anonymous source singled him out as having “the most toxic behaviour in the entire company” (via Google Translate).
Also arrested was Tommy François, Ubisoft’s former vice president for editorial and creative services. François was one of the first to be placed on leave when Ubisoft began investigating allegations of sexual harassment within the company. The names of the other three employees have so far not been reported.
When asked about the arrests, an Ubisoft spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz: “Ubisoft has no knowledge of what has been shared and therefore can’t comment.”
In the Libération report, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Maude Becker, provided a statement following the arrests, saying that the case reveals there was “systemic sexual violence” inside Ubisoft. “I’ve been doing this job for twenty-two years, this is the first time I’ve seen such substantial work [by the judicial police] on denunciations of this nature,” she said (via Google Translate). “In most cases of aggression and harassment, it is a person sometimes covered by their superior, it is not as established as it was at Ubisoft.”
