Fired Google Engineer : James Damore's 'Media Tour' Not Likely To Help His Legal Case

Since his firing from Google, James Damore has been on something of a media tour, starting with YouTubers popular among the alt-right, the fringe conservative movement that jumped to his defense this week.

The engineer -- dismissed for questioning women's suitability for some tech jobs in a company-wide memo -- gave his first interview to Canadian "men's rights" activist Stefan Molyneux, who is a vocal anti-feminist.

His second sit-down went to Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor who has shared similar sentiments on women.

On Tuesday night, he did his first mainstream broadcast interview, telling Bloomberg TV he felt "punished" and "shamed" by Google. (Bloomberg's Emily Chang took Damore to task for claiming there are biological causes for the dearth of women in tech leadership. "There is no research to support this idea," she said. Damore maintained that women are more likely to be interested in "people" rather than "things.")

His newly public profile hasn't come without scrutiny. Damore had to update his LinkedIn page after being found to have fudged his listed credentials, implying he completed a Ph.D. He in fact left the program to take a gig at Google.

And some of his former classmates told Wired that during his time at Harvard, he offended fellow grad students by performing a skit so off-color his program codirectors had to email the department to apologize.

Damore isn't backing down. He has said "he's exploring all possible legal remedies," and on Monday filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

But legal experts say Damore chances of success in the courts are slim, and are not likely to be helped by his increasingly public self-defense.

"I tend to think digging in his heels doesn't help him," said Brooke Schneider, a lawyer in the employment practice at New York's Withers Bergman LLP. "He's aligning himself with alt-right groups that are notorious for extreme views. He's not winning himself any positive votes."

David Sanford, who specializes in employment and gender discrimination cases in California, sees Damore's alt-right media blitz as misguided, if only because the free speech argument being used to justify the memo is flawed.

"It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of free speech, " said Sanford, chairman of Sanford Heisler Sharp LLP, who recently settled a class action case against tech giant Qualcomm on behalf of 3,300 women for $19.5 million.

"You have the absolute right to free speech at your dinner table," he said. "You don't have that in the workforce. Every employee has the right to work in a workplace free of discrimination. What they don't have the right to do is say any stupid thing that pops into their head. For conservatives to say they're 'shocked, shocked,' they should look at the constitution and some case law."

Neoma Ayala, special counsel in the litigation department at Cole Schotz, applauded Google CEO Sundar Pichai's memo in response to the manifesto, released on Tuesday.

"He was very careful to say they're not trying to stifle ideas that are different," she said. "The main thrust is that they had to terminate this employee because of sexist comments and offensive stereotypes against women. And if you replaced 'woman' with 'black person,' we wouldn't even be having this conversation."

On Thursday afternoon, Google will hold an all-hands meeting to address the Damore situation -- and, perhaps, the company's ongoing legal battle with the Department of Labor over the alleged gender pay gap at the tech giant.

For her part, Schneider expects Pichai to reinforce the company's firing decision. "They can't let that kind of vitriol go unanswered," she said.

by Clare O'Connor