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In 2018, two women filed a class-action suit against Riot Games, the video-game colossus responsible for League of Legends, Valorant, and other popular titles. They claimed that the company had denied them and other female employees “equal pay,” favored men for promotions, and created a “hostile work environment.” The women wanted Riot Games to pay out and to “cause social change.”
One year later, the parties agreed to a $10 million settlement. It was a massive sum, but not enough for California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which intervened to block the agreement and claim that Riot Games could be on the hook for a staggering $400 million. Facing a court battle against a deep-pocketed state agency, Riot Games later agreed to a $100 million settlement, about ten times the original amount.
California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, now called the Civil Rights Department, has turned the Riot Games strategy into an entire playbook. For years, the state’s civil rights apparatus has enabled nonprofits and lawyers to shake down major companies, spinning small-dollar claims into massive, multimillion-dollar settlements.
The system operates like a mafia. Its “don,” Governor Gavin Newsom, sits at the top. His capo, CRD director Kevin Kish, runs the shakedown campaigns. And the state advances the interests of the entire Democratic apparatus: the Civil Rights Department secures settlement cash for radical NGOs, labor leaders can use the cases to create pressure for unionization, and left-wing lawyers “cause social change” at scale. For the first time, we are revealing the inner workings of California’s civil rights mafia—and exposing the corruption of state government.
California’s Civil Rights Department was created in 1980 as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The department was initially tasked with enforcing nondiscrimination law, but in the wake of the #MeToo and George Floyd social movements, the state’s power structure saw an opportunity to turn the agency into a powerhouse. They rebranded the organization as the Civil Rights Department in 2022, in keeping with the agency’s focus on shaking down companies for “civil rights violations.”
The shakedown campaigns have been remarkably successful. In the last four years alone, the CRD has coerced corporations like Microsoft ($14 million), Snap Inc. ($15 million), and Riot Games ($100 million) to shell out eight- and nine-figure payments. These settlements have variously included provisions for class members, interest groups, and the CRD itself, which is allowed by state law to recoup fees associated with its prosecutions.
The CRD’s enforcement actions often include one or more predictable features. First, the CRD finds a handful of women or minorities who claim that a large corporation has mistreated them. Then the agency initiates or intervenes in an action against that corporation. Finally, to spin small-dollar claims into massive payouts, the CRD generates outrageous liability estimates, which goad the company to the negotiating table.
The point man on this scheme is Kevin Kish, a Yale Law School graduate and the CRD’s director. On its website, the agency notes Kish’s reputation for taking “a creative approach to advocacy,” which involves “collaborations” with nonprofits and “organizing campaigns”—in other words, using the department to advance the interests of unions, nonprofits, and other left-wing groups.
Kish mastered this approach during his time in the progressive legal movement. Before starting in state government, he worked as director of the Employment Rights Project for Bet Tzedek Legal Service, where, in one instance, he helped turn a small-time wage-and-hour case into a multimillion settlement against Walmart and one of its contractors.
Apparently pleased with Kish’s efforts, then-Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to lead the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in late 2014. Gay activists celebrated his appointment, with one LGBT group calling Kish a “strong and passionate legal champion.”
In his first few years at the DFEH, Kish oversaw several small-time suits: in 2015, he got a Mexican restaurant chain to cough up $130,000; in 2017, he induced a rural welfare nonprofit to shell out $152,000. Then, in 2019, he intervened in the Riot Games case, which later delivered a nine-figure payout and apparently encouraged him to expand his ambitions. For Kish, who has argued that “there is almost no [adult] transgender person who has not experienced . . . some form of discrimination,” the role represented an opportunity to enforce his broad understanding of “hate.”
By 2021, Kish had perfected the shakedown model and picked a new target: Activision Blizzard, the video-game giant that owns titles like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The CRD sued the company, alleging, among other things, that it had discriminated against female employees and cultivated a “frat boy” culture. According to a criminal referral that we obtained, which was filed by a group tied to former Activision CEO Robert Kotick, the pretext for the department’s action was an earlier federal complaint, which concluded that charging Activision would “send a message to the industry as a whole.”
The original class-action suit included just ten of Activision’s more than 9,000 employees. The complaint claimed, among other things, that “only about 20 percent” of the company’s employees were female, that some of its employees riffed “about their sexual encounters,” and that a female employee had committed suicide, potentially in connection with an alleged relationship with a supervisor.
Activision initially tried to placate the CRD. Kotick reportedly “pledged to add resources to ensure that Activision Blizzard’s hiring practices are more diverse.” The company’s then-president, J. Allen Brack, said that he “disdain[ed] ‘bro culture’” and had spent his “career fighting against it.” Activision apparently even offered paid time off to workers who wanted to participate in a staged “walk-out.”
It didn’t work. In fact, things got worse: later that year, sensing the company’s vulnerability, a labor union called the Communication Workers of America (CWA) filed a suit with the National Labor Relations Board. The union accused the company of trying to prevent workers from demanding a “more equitable, sustainable, and diverse workplace.”
The CRD and the CWA apparently had shared ambitions—to punish and to unionize Activision—and even hired the same law firm. Kish’s CRD hired the same firm (Outten & Golden) that represented the CWA in another suit. The firm’s lawyer said that he believed it was the “first time the State of California has retained a private firm to prosecute employment law claims in trial court.” (In response to a question about Outten & Golden, CRD pointed us to a ruling in California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment v. California State Personnel Board.)
In September, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought its own misconduct suit against Activision. The agency claimed, among other things, that Activision had exposed “female employees to sexual harassment.” The two sides agreed to an $18 million settlement, but the CRD wasn’t satisfied.
Kish saw an opportunity for a billion-dollar shakedown. Under his direction, the CRD moved to block the eight-figure settlement with the federal government, reportedly arguing that it “was monetarily inadequate and contrary to public policy.” Their bid proved unsuccessful: a federal court denied the CRD’s requested intervention, and the settlement took effect the following March.
By this point, Activision had already agreed to pay nearly $20 million and declared its intention to change its policies and performance-review system. But Kish apparently wanted to inflict more damage on the company. The Wall Street Journal reported that sometime in 2021, the CRD estimated that Activision was responsible for nearly $1 billion in damages—an outrageous sum.
Despite the federal settlement, the CRD continued its lawsuit, and other elements of the shakedown campaign came to life. In November, then-Journal reporter Kirsten Grind and others alleged that Kotick failed to disclose alleged sexual misconduct committed against female employees. The company’s stock price fell 8 percent within a month.
Some Activision executives and other allies suspected that the state colluded with the press. The same legal filing we obtained claimed that Grind is a “CWA-affiliated union member” and had contacted Janette Wipper, the CRD attorney overseeing the Activision case under Kish, in hopes of having an “important” conversation “off the record.” Grind and a coauthor gloated that, after her report, “some employees and investors called for Kotick’s ouster, and Microsoft saw an opening to make a deal” to buy Activision.
When we asked Grind, now with the New York Times, for comment on this story, she suggested that we reach out to the Wall Street Journal.
Activision executives wanted to fight back. Under pressure from the state, the unions, and the media, the company hired three lobbyists: Greg Campbell, Dana Williamson, and, according to a source familiar with the case, Alexis Podesta.
In early 2022, the tide began to turn. In March, Newsom’s office fired Wipper. Notably, she was fired on the same day that a federal court approved the EEOC settlement, which our source interpreted as a sign that the governor’s office was feeling pressure and wanted the case to go away.
Less than a month later, Wipper’s subordinate, Melanie Proctor, resigned in protest, claiming that Newsom’s office had “repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation.”
Eventually, Kish scaled back his demands. In December 2023, Activision settled for $55 million. In the settlement agreement, the state conceded that “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated” allegations of systemic harassment, but the company likely signed the deal to make the lawsuit go away. The government had not proved its case but still managed to shake down its mark for tens of millions of dollars.
The Civil Rights Department made sure to spread the winnings around. In the settlement, Activision agreed to deliver a handsome reward to the CRD’s NGO foot soldiers. The court required the company to send up to about $9 million to the CRD and Outten & Golden, the CWA’s former counsel. The rest of the $55 million was supposedly reserved for affected workers, but any leftover funds not claimed by those workers would support future shakedowns—specifically, CRD-selected organizations that “promote employment rights for workers in California and/or . . . advance the interests of women workers in technology industries.”
The unions had their victory, too. In October 2023, Microsoft acquired Activision for $75.4 billion after agreeing to a host of labor provisions. The CWA considered the merger a massive success, boasting that it provided “a clear path to collective bargaining for almost 10,000 workers.”
With the final settlement agreement, the Activision story appeared to be over. But there another storyline was brewing beneath the surface, raising serious questions about the Newsom administration. That story involves Dana Williamson, the one-time Activision lobbyist, who, in January 2023, while the Activision litigation was ongoing, became Governor Newsom’s chief of staff.
During her time in the governor’s office, Williamson kept tabs on the Activision case. According to a source with detailed knowledge of the case, the governor sent a text message to Kotick, which we reviewed, one week after the December 2023 settlement, sharing gratitude that the saga was finally over. In January 2024, according to the source and government records obtained by the whistleblower Melanie Proctor, Kotick met with Williamson and former Activision lobbyist Alexis Podesta in the governor’s office.
According to the source, Kotick, by then retired as Activision CEO, sat down with Williamson to discuss clearing Activision’s name—after all, the state had admitted that it had found no evidence of systematic harassment. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, claims that midway through the meeting, Newsom stepped into the room, engaged in conversation, and, unprovoked, said that he would fire Kish.
Newsom’s office did not respond to our request for comment about these allegations.
Williamson apparently believed him. In November 2025, Williamson was indicted on a suite of federal corruption charges, including bank and wire fraud. According to court documents, Williamson conspired with Greg Campbell, another former Activision lobbyist, to siphon money from a dormant campaign account to pay a third party. She and Campbell were both later convicted, with Williamson pleading guilty to multiple fraud counts and lying to federal agents.
The alleged corruption was not related to Activision, but the indictment contained a transcript of a conversation between Williamson and Podesta, the former Activision lobbyist and un-indicted co-conspirator, that sheds light on Newsom’s potential involvement in the civil rights mafia. In a conversation that occurred “[i]n or about June 2024,” prosecutors said Williamson discussed a public records request related to a corporation’s “litigation with the state.” When Podesta asked Williamson if a state employee connected to that litigation would be fired, she said: “He sure [will]!”
According to multiple outlets and our own review of the evidence, the corporation in question was almost certainly Activision. And we can report, for the first time, that the official in question was likely the head of the Civil Rights Department. In other words, Williamson appears to have told her alleged co-conspirator that, as late as June 2024, Governor Newsom was planning to fire Kevin Kish.
The Kish firing, however, never materialized. Kish remains the director of the Civil Rights Department. And more shakedown campaigns are in the pipeline.
This all raises a question: Why is Newsom enabling this racket?
One theory is that Newsom sympathizes with Kish and wants to punish corporations like Activision, which, in his mind, are stand-ins for his political enemies. Another theory is that Newsom has always allowed bad behavior to fester around him at arm’s length. Throughout Newsom’s career, people in his orbit have been arrested for corruption, including, most recently, his chief of staff.
Perhaps Newsom tolerates Kish’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach because he simply lacks the will to stop it.
The most likely explanation, however, is that Newsom will do whatever is politically expedient. Under this theory, Newsom might have promised to fire Kish to placate Williamson or corporate interests, then reneged on that promise to placate the unions and the activist groups. Throughout his career, Newsom has been willing to reverse his position if he believes that it is in his immediate interest.
Newsom’s office did not respond to our request for comment on this story. The Civil Rights Department told us that they “take every complaint we receive seriously and evaluate them individually for further action based on the specific facts and circumstances.”
If anything, Kish operated under even less restraint. The CRD has now set its sight on the largest target of all: Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In 2022, the department sued Tesla, alleging racial discrimination and harassment. Kish apparently hopes to go much further than in his campaigns against Riot Games, Snap, and Activision. According to a source familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Kish is hoping to shake down Tesla for up to $6 billion.
Unlike those other firms, however, Tesla hasn’t settled and is taking its chances in court. If Tesla succeeds in fighting these allegations, its resistance could provide a model for future targets of the state’s racket. If it fails, it will show that no company—no matter how powerful—can outrun the coordinated campaigns of California’s civil rights mafia.
