Former Meta executive sues to block memoir gag order

Sarah Wynn-Williams sued Meta in federal court Thursday, asking a judge to lift a gag order she says is being used to silence her memoir and punish her for speaking about life inside the company. The former Facebook director of global public policy says Meta is trying to contain a damaging insider account by turning arbitration, severance terms and financial pressure into a muzzle.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks to void the private arbitration order and invalidate the severance agreement Wynn-Williams says she signed under duress. It says Meta obtained the order without Wynn-Williams being present or represented, then used it to bar her from speaking about Meta or promoting Careless People, her bestselling memoir about Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan.

Careless People was published in March 2025, selling 60,000 copies in its first week, reaching Amazon’s top 10 and later becoming a No. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir. Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling that same month that temporarily halted promotion of the book, and the lawsuit says that ruling has been stretched into a year-long ban on public discussion of the memoir.

Wynn-Williams served at Facebook from 2011 until she was fired in 2017. Her book details Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to win favor with Chinese officials. Wynn-Williams repeated those claims in public testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on April 9, 2025, at the hearing titled A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress.

The filing says Meta has demanded 50,000 dollars in damages for each alleged violation of the non-disparagement clause and refused to reimburse about 310,000 dollars in business expenses after her termination. Wynn-Williams also says the company monitored her public appearances for more than a year, sent representatives to events and photographed her to confirm that she said nothing about Meta or the memoir, including at an arts and literary festival in the United Kingdom.

Meta rejected the suit and said Wynn-Williams was trying to use the legal system to sell books. The company also repeated its view that Careless People is riddled with false claims and divorced from reality.