This industry still has a lot of growing up to do.
Bully from Rockstar Games

According to a report filed by Kotaku's Jason Schreier, a former Rockstar designer says that a former top executive groped him. The designer, Colin Brundschu, says that he wasn't sure what to do when he was groped by Jeronimo Barrera, the former VP of product development at Rockstar.

Bundschu says that after he was hired in 2014, his colleagues gave him a warning of "don't cross Jeronimo Barrera." He was warned by many employees to "mind how you talk to him." Barrera, according to sources, had a reputation for screaming at people, and flying off at the handle at anybody that simply rubbed him the wrong way. Often times, these victims would then be fired shortly after.

This is why Bundschu wasn't quite sure what to do after he claims Barrera groped him shortly after he started at the company. He says that Barrera also asked him to sit on his lap and rub his inner thigh area. Though these allegations are only coming to light today via Schreier's report, the incident was filed to Rockstar's human resources department in the days following the alleged incident. He also told at least four other people.

Human Resources are often not out to protect the employee. They are often designed to mitigate the damage done to the brand or company. That is an important thing to remember when you hear that Rockstar's HR department seemed to do very little in response to Bundschu's claims. Bundschu says that HR spoke to Barrera and others present as part of their investigation. Barrera either denied the accusation or told Rockstar he did not remember what happened. This led HR to determine that Bundschu's claim of being sexually harassed was unsubstantiated.

A few months later, Bundschu left Rockstar. He eventually left the gaming industry completely. In 2017 he wrote about the incident in a self-published book using pseudonyms for Barrera and others involved in the incident. Bundschu says that he's going public now in hopes that it helps to prevent incidents like this from happening again.

Barrera, who departed from Rockstar in 2018 after two decades with the company, denies these allegations. When reached by Kotaku last week, he first called to say that the incident had not happened, then sent over a statement through his attorney, Robert Tracy: “Mr. Barrera categorically denies all of the allegations of misconduct you raised with him.” Tracy and Barrera would not elaborate further or comment on the specifics in this story. “Mr. Barrera stands by his statement,” Tracy said in an email when given more details.

When contacted for comment, Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive provided a statement, attributed to Take-Two spokesperson Alan Lewis: “We take these matters extremely seriously. While we do not comment publicly on the specifics of individual investigations, in any case where an employee raises workplace concerns, we investigate them and take appropriate action.” Rockstar would not comment further.
I urge you to read Kotaku's report in its entirety. It details more about the impact this has had on Bundschu, details about the "cult-like" mentality of working at Rockstar, and more. This cult-like work environment does seem to tie in quite closely with another report from Jason Schreier from October 2018, in which he talked about Rockstar's dangerous "Culture of Crunch."

A complete day to day breakdown of the events that transpired is included in today's report. This also includes information about how Bundschu's claims amounted to nothing more than a promise by Rockstar's higher-ups to put employees through anti-harassment training. Whether ot not that training actually happened was not made clear. From the looks of things, a whole lot of nothing came as a result of these rather severe allegations.