Chinese e-commerce bigwig Alibaba has just fired a manager who allegedly sexually assaulted a female employee. Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang announced on Monday that the unnamed manager working under Alibaba’s City Retail will never be rehired by the company.
According to Reuters, the said female employee posted an 11-page account on Alibaba’s intranet giving a full account of what transpired between her and her manager. She claimed that her supervisor and a client sexually assaulted her while they were on a business trip.
The unnamed staffer alleged that her supervisor coerced her into going on a business trip with him to meet one of her team's clients in the city of Jinan, located about 900 kilometres from Alibaba's headquarters in Hangzhou.
According to the victim, the client had kissed her and that she had woken up in a hotel room the following day without her clothes on and had no memory of what happened after they had started drinking. CCTV footage the staffer was able to obtain from the hotel showed that her boss had entered her room four times during the night.
Police are currently looking into the case and conducting an investigation. The employee alleges there were “intimate acts” that took place when she was in an inebriated state. In her statement, she cited how upper management failed to take action on the incident when she brought the matter to the attention of human resources upon returning to Hangzhou. Although human resources initially agreed, they did not follow through with an appropriate action to address her complaint.
As investigations are underway, a list of other individuals possibly involved and mentioned in the victim’s account are due for questioning. Zhang said the City Retail unit’s president and human resources head have handed in their resignations while Alibaba’s chief people officer earned a "demerit”.
Citing the company’s stand on sexual harassment, Alibaba said they will conduct a company-wide training to prevent future occurences of sexual harassment in the work environment as well as the implementation of a channel where staffers are free to report such incidents. Alibaba said they will also issue a formal zero-tolerance anti-sexual harassment policy.
"We have suspended relevant parties suspected of violating our policies and values, and have established a special internal task force to investigate the issue and support the ongoing police investigation," the Alibaba CEO said in a statement.
Meanwhile, with the ongoing sex scandal involving Chinese-Canadian Kris Wu is raking in social media unrest, the Alibaba incident has since joined the ranks of top-trending posts on Chinese social media platform Weibo.
