Alibaba Group has terminated a manager accused of rape, following an employee's claims on the company's intranet that her boss and a client sexually assaulted her.
The Chinese e-commerce company is moving to contain the scandal after an employee's allegations exposed "problems" with the culture at the country's tech leader, The Guardian reported Monday.
The unidentified woman's account, published through an 11-page PDF document, sparked a social media storm on China's Twitter-like microblogging website Weibo.
In a statement Sunday, Alibaba said it also had put on suspension "relevant parties suspected of violating our policies and values," the company said in quotes by AFP, asserting it had a "zero-tolerance policy" against sexual misdeed.
The female employee said her boss came into her hotel room and raped her when she was intoxicated after a night of drinking with clients in the city of Jinan, Bloomberg reported.
The boss has confessed he performed sexual acts with the employee and authorities will determine whether he violated the law, according to a memo.
The female employee said complaints she made to Alibaba's human resources department were ignored, the Associated Press reported.
The incident has blown the lid off prevalent mistreatment of female employees across companies in the country, where the #MeToo social movement against sexual abuse thus far failed to make any major headway as widely as in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.
In a recent case, police arrested Chinese-Canadian pop star Kris Wu in Beijing on suspicion of rape after a Chinese influencer accused him of forcing girls to drink alcohol and, then, sexually molesting them.
Wu denied the accusations on his Weibo account.
The #MeToo movement first gained attention in China in 2018 when accusations against a professor in a Beijing university were shared on the Internet.
The Chinese government had already put Alibaba on its crosshairs, with regulators launching a broad campaign to rein in the growing influence of the country's tech titans.
In April, China's regulators slapped Alibaba with a record $2.7 billion fine over practices it viewed to be an abuse of its dominant market position.
