A lawsuit filed by a former employee of J. Walter Thompson makes shocking allegations against the company’s CEO.
According to the New York Post, JWT’s chief communications officer Erin Johnson filed a discrimination suit against the ad giant’s CEO Gustavo Martinez for making sexist, anti-Semitic, and racial slurs against company employees.
One of the most shocking allegations in the suit is that Martinez said multiple times that certain women should “shut up [their] mouths” and that a female executive needed to be “hogtied” and “raped into submission.”
The lawsuit also claims that Martinez called African Americans “monkeys” and that he complained about this hometown of Westchester because there were “too many Jews.”
According to the suit, when Johnson reported Martinez’s behavior to executives at JWT and WPP (WPPGY), the agency’s parent company, the CEO responded by cutting her bonus and excluding her from meetings.
In a statement provided to Fortune by a spokesperson at WPP, Martinez said that the is “aware of the allegations made against [him] by a J. Walter Thompson employee in a suit filed in New York Federal Court” and that “there is absolutely no truth to these outlandish allegations.”
