My former employer is a massive player in the education/tech space. They host what is now the largest youth robotics competition in the country and are also heavily involved in other areas of competitive robotics including Battlebots. Full-time employees and interns both have been victims of abuse by this company including myself. I consider myself lucky as my situation was nowhere near as bad as what others faced, especially if you were a woman or part of any marginalized community.
Several employees have come forward saying that they had their life threatened, put into extremely compromising situations, and were subjected to verbal abuse, fear-based management tactics, and extreme sexual misconduct including the grooming of minor employees (high school aged teens from local robotics team were often exploited for cheap labor).
The alleged misconduct is no secret amongst current or former employees. We have all witnessed it. After years of people not coming forward out of fear, many are now speaking out against the company, especially its CEO who is the biggest culprit. However, despite how prominent this company is in my hometown, local media has made no attempt to talk about it. A combination of small-town local politics, how much control the company has over that particular niche, and likely due to the niche itself, the conversations being are not making it out of the online spaces where the discussions are taking place. In fact, one of the forums was completely taken down by the company an hour after the most recent post in order to stop the discussions. This is after nearly 2 weeks of people coming forward. For a large national news network, maybe it's too small to talk about, but the community affected by this isn't small. Several of the robotics teams have removed the company as their sponsor and several schools have canceled orders from my understanding but other than that, the CEO looks like he will probably come out of this unscathed. They did finally put out a statement, where they basically just blamed the victims and denied everything.
My question is, what do we do? People are finally brave enough to come forward and it looks like the CEO and the rest of the company are just going to continue getting away with it. This is a company thats heavily involved in the local community by sponsoring almost every major event in town, donating lots of money to the schools robotics programs, and donating a lot to local law enforcement. We have 2 local papers, neither have which have responded to emails. The CEO continues to take advantage of the fact that he operates in a small town as well as easy access to young impressionable people they can take advantage of who come to work at what appears to be a fun company and to follow their heroes robotics competition space.