According to an investigation by the New York Times, Andy Rubin, who invented the Android smartphone software, was handed £70 million ($137.9m) in exchange for his letter of resignation after being investigated for sexual assault. He allegedly coerced an employee into performing a sex act on him in a hotel room in 2013 - a claim he denies.
Google's bro culture has been the subject of problematic headlines before. Former Google engineer Loretta Lee sued the tech giant for sexual harassment and discrimination earlier this year.
She claimed that male colleagues would spike her drinks with whiskey and frequently made her the target of lewd comments. Google failed to do anything to help, her lawsuit claimed. When she reported the incident to human resources, she was told to take medical leave, and when she returned she was fired for "performance issues".
"This kind of behavior is rampant in the Valley," says a source close to Google. "We all talked about it but no one seemed to care."
These explosive accounts only represent a fraction of the complaints against tech giants.
"It's broken and things are still not fixed," says Therese Lawless, the Silicon Valley employment lawyer that represented venture capitalist and businesswoman Ellen Pao in a sexual discrimination battle. She lost but unveiled the toxic culture of Silicon Valley for the first time.
The world is seldom awarded this kind of peek at the seedy underbelly of Silicon Valley because NDAs and clauses in contracts ensure that any conflict is settled behind closed doors.
Instead they take place within the walls of arbitration rooms, where the public cannot hear victim's side of the story. "People get ripped to shreds," says Jennifer Schwartz, an employment lawyer that has tackled Silicon Valley tech giants for years.
"So many women are fearful and rightfully so, going to a jury or an arbitrator and being torn apart."
The vast majority of women who have exposed sexual harassment are already traumatised, she explains. "I see a lot of white-washed internal investigations where the woman is either disciplined or terminated. It upends their lives and the last thing they want to do is go through the horrors of trial."
Allegations about the bad culture in Silicon Valley have existed since before the #MeToo movement.
Chang says that Silicon Valley men get "incredible powerful and unimaginably wealthy, leading them to become disconnected with reality, causing their bad behaviour".
Schwartz says this behaviour is getting worse. There is a tolerance of bad behaviour because there is a "wild west" culture and an esteem for peculiarity. It has contributed to a failure to care about diversity and egalitarianism on all levels. This, she says, has been sacrificed for being the next IPO.
Silicon Valley, she adds, is the worst workplace she has ever seen. "Over the past seven or eight years or more I have been flabbergasted at the kind of behaviours that I am seeing through the women that come to me with claims of sexual harassment and gender discrimination."
Lawyers fighting sexual harassment claims have gained a small victory. From January 1 next year employers in Silicon Valley will no longer be able to silence workers who claim to have been victims of sexual harassment and assault.
New laws will allow an alleged perpetrator name to be made public, while an alleged victim's name will remain private. The hope from the employment lawyers battling big tech organisations is that this will put an end to damaging non-disclosure agreements, which claimants are forced to sign if they want a settlement.
Whether that changes the "brotopia" of Silicon Valley remains to be seen.
"Do I think it's a perfect fix? No," Lawless says. "We still have this issue of things being sent into arbitration to begin with. That is a huge problem that needs to be overcome. Unless we get some sort of change in that law on a national level, people are going to be forced into these secret tribunals. It's one step forward but not the solution."
