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.
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