Gurbaksh Chahal, the former RadiumOne CEO who was fired last year after a domestic violence conviction, is in trouble with the law again: he was arrested for allegedly kicking another girlfriend, and prosecutors want to revoke his probation. But that's not his only problem. Gravity4, the new company he founded to compete with RadiumOne, is starting to fall apart at the seams, former employees say.
Gravity4 and Chahal are already being sued for gender discrimination, and more legal troubles could be on the way: other former employees say they are contemplating legal action against him and the company. Sales are slow, and many employees are hired and then fired or pressured to resign after just a few months because they aren't a "good fit," according to former employees. That group includes one woman whose experience at the company closely mirrors that of another woman who recently sued the company for gender discrimination.
Erika Alonso, the company's former senior vice president of global marketing, filed a lawsuit last month that says she was discriminated against because of her age and gender, harassed and illegally spied on during her time at the company. Alonso, who is over 40, said she was hired in part because having a female executive would help the company's image, which is damaged because of Chahal's domestic violence conviction last year.
That image was made even worse last week when a police report of a second domestic violence incident involving Chahal surfaced, first reported by the San Francisco Business Times. Chahal was arrested in October for allegedly repeatedly kicking a girlfriend in the leg during an argument and threatening to report her to immigration authorities, according to the San Francisco police chronology document reviewed by FORBES. The girlfriend also said in the report that Chahal had been violent with her in the past, grabbing her by the hair and once bruising her wrist during arguments. Chahal and Gravity4 did not respond to requests for comment about the report, though a company representative told Business Insider it was "frivolous and baseless."
After Alonso sued, Gravity4 shot back with a statement from Chahal and two women at the company -- global head of recruiting Staci King and chief of staff Michelle Louangamath -- that said the suit was "baseless," "all about money," and a "sad, desperate cry for publicity" in the wake of the Ellen Pao trial. The company also said Alonso "failed to produce any tasks" assigned to her by former Gravity4 president Wayne Powers.
But privately, King sympathized with Alonso and acknowledged Chahal and Gravity4's bad record with women, according to text messages between King and Alonso obtained by FORBES. King recruited Alonso, and the two developed a friendly relationship while they worked together.
On January 27, when Chahal and Alonso had a disagreement about a marketing video, he wrote an email to company executives, scolding her for work she hadn't finished and telling her to "move on" to her next assignment. When King saw the email, she wrote to Alonso, "How in god's green earth when u have so much shit in the press about being abusive to a woman can u speak to and treat your Head of Marketing that way?!"
Soon after that, Powers told Alonso that Chahal and the company no longer thought she was "a good fit," according to the lawsuit. He encouraged her to resign. On January 30, Alonso found out she had been fired when she was cut off from her email.
"I'm heartbroken for what you're going through," King texted her around that time. "I know how hard you've been working and how much you've given up." Later, she called what Alonso went through "so wrong."
In the lawsuit, Alonso also describes being grilled by a Gravity4 executive during her interview about whether she believed that Chahal was guilty of hitting his former girlfriend 117 times, an attack for which he was arrested in 2013 and charged with 45 felony counts. After a judge ruled that surveillance video of the attack was taken without a warrant, Chahal was convicted of just two misdemeanor counts -- domestic violence and battery -- after a plea deal and went on to claim his innocence online, calling the process a "witch hunt."
Alonso said in texts she was "taken aback" by the questioning about whether she believed Chahal was innocent and told King about the experience. King responded by text that she talked to a company executive about the interviews who "was disturbed by it" and said he wouldn't let the interviewer "do interviews alone with females until we figure this out." Later, according to the lawsuit, Alonso found out that Chahal had secretly bugged the conference room where the interview was taking place, was watching a live video feed and was texting questions to the interviewer to ask her.
Alonso and her attorney Harmeet Dhillon declined to comment, and Gravity4 and King did not respond to requests for comment. In an earlier statement, Gravity4 denied bugging the conference room.
Alonso isn't the only employee who claims to have encountered discrimination for being an older woman. A female sales director over 40 who was hired remotely and worked at Gravity4 for five weeks was fired abruptly and without warning after the first time Chahal and Powers saw her in person at a sales meeting, she told FORBES.
The employee, who did not want to give her name for fear of retaliation, said that she had been hired by someone in sales and had spoken to Powers only on the phone. But after the meeting, in which she said she suggested a sales strategy and Chahal "flew off the handle" at her, Powers pulled her aside and said she wasn't a good fit for the company. She protested and said she hadn't had a chance to prove herself, but she was laid off without severance several days later anyway.
Several people were fired the same day, she said, also without warning or severance. "It messed with a lot of people's lives," she said. Powers, a former
Former employees described a company without a consistent direction, where each time Gravity4 acquired a new company -- which it has done nine times in about nine months -- the sales team was told to shift strategies and sell a different product. They said Chahal would walk into sales meetings accompanied by his several-hundred-pound bodyguard and berate the team for not making sales in their first two weeks.
In a recent press release, the company said it was "on track" to reach $100 million in revenue this year. But a former employee on the sales side said there was "not a chance" that that number was reachable. The employee estimated that Gravity4 itself has done $75,000 in sales, and even if the company added up the revenues of all its acquisitions, it wouldn't come close to $100 million. Other former sales employees also said Gravity4 sales were minimal. Many former employees who spoke to FORBES declined to give their names for fear of legal retaliation from Chahal, whom one RadiumOne former head of marketing described as "one of the most vindictive and most reprehensible people I know."
The San Francisco District Attorney is seeking to revoke Chahal's probation based on the second alleged domestic violence incident, which took place in September and was reported in October. A probation hearing is scheduled for San Francisco Superior Court on September 11.
