Two women who worked at SAP say it mishandled their claims of rape by colleagues; seven others say they experienced or witnessed sexual harassment at SAP events
Bloomberg : Tweets: @turnergs and @oliviasolon Tweets: Giles Turner / @turnergs : Here is the 2nd part of our investigation into culture at SAP w/ @athomson6 https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : “the accused attackers said they had sexual relations with the victims and that each woman appeared to be very drunk or acting abnormally, according to summaries of SAP's internal investigations” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 Bloomberg investigation by Giles Turner and Olivia Solon is the earliest piece in what became a running record of culture problems at SAP: it documents two women who say the company mishandled their claims of rape by colleagues, plus seven others reporting harassment at SAP events, with SAP's own internal-investigation summaries leaning on the attackers' accounts that the women were 'very drunk.'
The arc continued long after publication: German prosecutors opened a sexual harassment probe into SAP CTO Jürgen Müller ahead of his resignation in late 2024 (prosecutors opened a probe into SAP's CTO), and months later SAP promoted a team lead accused by five female staff of targeting female subordinates (SAP promoted an accused team lead) — both developments that keep the questions raised in this investigation live.
First-order effects
- The nine named and unnamed women at SAP see their allegations aired publicly for the first time, while SAP faces scrutiny of internal investigations that recorded the accused attackers' claim that each victim 'appeared to be very drunk or acting abnormally.'
- SAP's HR function is directly implicated: the story centers on how the company handled — or mishandled — formal complaints from employees about colleagues.
Second-order effects
- Employee-led disclosure becomes the workaround where internal channels fail, echoing the path at Microsoft, where workers forced an investigation by sharing overlooked discrimination claims in a mass email chain (Microsoft workers forced a probe via an email chain).
- For SAP, reputational exposure compounds over time rather than fading — the same reporters' beat resurfaced in 2024 with the CTO probe and the accused team lead's promotion, keeping the 2022 findings attached to every subsequent culture story.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across SAP, Verkada's documented 'bro culture' (Verkada's 'bro culture' reporting), and the Daversa recruiting-firm lawsuit, external scrutiny — journalists and now prosecutors — displaces internal HR as the enforcement mechanism for workplace misconduct at major tech firms.
- Boards and regulators may come to treat the quality of a company's internal harassment investigations as a governance issue on par with financial controls, since SAP's case shows internal summaries can become public evidence against the company.
The trend: Workplace-misconduct accountability at large tech companies is shifting from confidential HR processes to public exposure by journalists and, in SAP's case, criminal prosecutors.