Bobby Kotick Pressured Media to Change Stories, Then Used the Edits as Evidence in Court

Source: People Make Games | Published: 2026-09-24T14:26:19Z

The law firm Clare Locke boasts on its website: 'Our greatest victories are the scandals you never read about in the news.'

This was not an isolated incident. It was a systematic campaign.

One Letter, One Playbook

Kotick's firm of choice is Clare Locke — one of America's most prominent reputation management law firms. The same firm that won Dominion Voting Systems a $787 million settlement against Fox News. The same firm that threatened the New York Post on behalf of Harvard. New York Times reporter David Enrich described it as "a small but ferocious law firm that makes threats and files lawsuits against media organizations."

Clare Locke's own marketing materials say it plainly: "Our greatest victories are the flawed stories that are never published and the scandals you never read about in the news."

After California's Civil Rights Department (CRD) filed sexual harassment charges against Activision Blizzard in 2021, Clare Locke sent legal letters to dozens of outlets — Kotaku, Gizmodo, GameSpot, Forbes, Eurogamer, Business Insider, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times — demanding they delete or modify content referencing the CRD lawsuit, particularly passages citing the WSJ investigation. The letters warned that failure to comply would be treated as evidence of "actual malice" — the highest bar in American defamation law, and the standard a public figure must clear to win a case.

A 375-Word Article That Disappeared

GameSpot deleted a 375-word article in which passages about Kotick accounted for less than a third of the total text.

The article reported that Activision Blizzard had been accused of fostering a "frat-house culture rife with sexual harassment," and had reached a settlement with California worth more than $50 million.

There was a factual error: the article treated $54 million and a separate $47 million as two distinct payments, when in fact the latter was included in the former. That warranted a correction. Under normal circumstances, an editor's note would do.

Instead, the article was deleted entirely, with no explanation.

Reporter Male Clement, who investigated the incident, didn't catch the numerical error until twelve months into his reporting. His real question was: did GameSpot pull the article because editors genuinely believed they had published defamatory content — or because they couldn't afford to litigate against a plaintiff with unlimited legal resources?

GameSpot declined to answer any questions.

"The WSJ Report Was Debunked" — That Claim Doesn't Hold Up

The central argument Clare Locke repeated across every legal letter was that the WSJ's 2021 investigation of Kotick had been "debunked" — citing as evidence the CRD's settlement with Activision Blizzard and a third-party investigation commissioned by Activision itself.

The WSJ piece is still online. It has never been corrected. It has never been retracted. The paper's response said it all: "We have not changed the story, and that speaks for itself."

Clare Locke offered three arguments: first, that the CRD withdrew some harassment claims in the settlement, which therefore invalidated the WSJ's reporting; second, that a WSJ opinion editorial had criticized regulators for bringing "meritless charges" against corporations; third, that Activision's own internal investigation contradicted the reporting.

The problem with all three: none of them address the foundation of the WSJ story. The investigation relied on its own independent sources — memos, emails, regulatory filings, interviews with former employees and people with direct knowledge — sources entirely separate from the CRD's legal position. A settlement between the CRD and Activision does not retroactively invalidate what reporters independently documented.

As for the opinion editorial — the WSJ's news and opinion operations function completely independently. As Clement noted in his reporting, at papers he'd worked for, the opinion section was sometimes just "an annoying or embarrassing thing that exists."

Clare Locke's logic, stripped down, works like this: treat every source of damaging information about Kotick — government investigation, media reporting — as a single unified claim, then use the resolution of one piece to declare the entire edifice discredited.

Smaller Outlets Have No Choice

Press freedom has never been purely a legal question. It's an economic one.

New York Times v. Sullivan established the foundational principle of American defamation law: for a public figure to win a defamation case, they must prove "actual malice" — that the outlet published knowing the content was false, or with reckless disregard for its truth. It's an intentionally high bar, designed to protect journalism.

For smaller outlets, that protection is largely theoretical.

Disney (ABC's parent) and Paramount (CBS's parent) recently chose to settle with Trump rather than invoke Sullivan in court — even though multiple media law experts believed both companies could have won. For resource-constrained outlets, even a strong legal position doesn't change the fact that litigation itself is a cost they can't afford.

Clare Locke understands this perfectly. When a small outlet receives one of these letters, the question is rarely "did we break the law?" It's "can we survive what comes next?"

In Clement's accounting, several major papers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters — held firm and made no changes. Gaming outlets largely folded. The difference wasn't who had the stronger legal position. It was who had lawyers.

Use Their Compliance as Evidence, Then Sue Them Anyway

Clare Locke's handling of Kotaku and Gizmodo is the most convoluted episode in the whole affair.

The letters demanded changes. Worth noting: Kotaku's original text included the line "Kotick knew about everything happening under him and refused to act" — a claim that went beyond what the WSJ reported and was legitimately contestable. Both sites made revisions, removing the citations to the WSJ investigation; Kotaku's disputed sentence was also pulled.

Clare Locke then cited both outlets' revisions in subsequent letters to other media as proof: see, they changed their articles — you should too.

Then, in March 2025, Kotick sued Kotaku and Gizmodo's parent company G/O Media — on the grounds that the changes hadn't gone far enough, and that certain remaining language was in fact "malicious."

Two months later, Kotick voluntarily dropped the suit.

Stuart Karle, adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and former general counsel of The Wall Street Journal, described the lawsuit as "tactically quite clever." The first three paragraphs of the complaint dragged the WSJ into the frame, characterizing it as a co-conspirator in a CRD scheme to hire "unethical journalists" to wage a "false attack" — but the WSJ was not a defendant, and no one was going to show up in court to defend the paper.

Karle told Clement that the lawsuit was less about winning than about creating a legally binding public document containing Kotick's version of events.

The Story Itself Almost Never Got Published

Clement spent nearly two years tracking down this story: collecting legal letters, filing public records requests in California, contacting every relevant party, interviewing defamation law experts.

The real obstacle wasn't the investigation. It was publication.

He pitched multiple outlets. All passed. One prominent magazine told him explicitly that, given its own exposure to potential legal action from another powerful figure, it couldn't take on the piece.

When he considered self-publishing, Clement consulted a media attorney who advised him to get liability insurance. When he went looking, he was told that no insurer would write him a policy unless he could demonstrate that his publishing platform generated at least $50,000 in annual revenue. His newsletter didn't qualify.

In the end, People Make Games took the story and absorbed the legal costs. Host Chris Bratt noted at the end of the video that they were able to publish because of their audience — the outlet runs entirely on Patreon.

There May Be Another Story Behind the Settlement

In late 2024, Dana Williamson — former chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom — was charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, and subsequently reached a plea agreement with prosecutors.

One count in the indictment stood out from the rest: Williamson was accused of leaking internal California government information about a lawsuit to lobbying consultants working for the defendant company. The indictment also stated that in January 2023, Williamson told a co-conspirator that she had instructed a senior government attorney to transfer the case to another state agency and push for a settlement.

According to subsequent reporting by the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee, the "first defendant company" in the indictment was almost certainly Activision Blizzard.

When the CRD settled with Activision in 2023, The New York Times called the outcome "a stunning reversal" and asked directly: how did California regulators go from accusing Activision of a systemic culture of sexual harassment to withdrawing all related charges just two years later? The process was never made clear.

That question still has no complete answer. The plea deal significantly reduces the likelihood that further details will ever enter the public record.

But the indictment at least offers one possible explanation for part of the narrative: the CRD's decision to withdraw its charges may not have stemmed entirely from the reasons Kotick and his attorneys have long claimed.

That answer will require more journalists to go looking.