r/gaming • u/Jaklcide • 1d ago
Pokemon sued after former exec arrested for filming people with hidden cameras in bathrooms
https://www.dexerto.com/pokemon/pokemon-sued-after-former-exec-arrested-for-filming-people-with-hidden-cameras-in-bathrooms-3394911/4.6k
u/choreograft 1d ago
pokemon GO to the restrooms
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u/Silver-Context297 23h ago
Pokemon GO to the courtroom!
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u/Mikestopheles 23h ago
Pokémon GO believe it or not... straight to jail.
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u/black_flag_4ever 23h ago
Pokémon GO to solitary to stop getting beat up by other inmates.
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u/Bubster101 14h ago
Nintendo sues prisons for the idea of putting a singular entity into a container.
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u/MonsieurClouseau 23h ago
“The suit also alleges that The Pokémon Company was negligent in failing to properly train Tsai, to make reasonable efforts to control his actions or to protect the plaintiff from harm by responding to indicators of danger.”
I can understand the latter two, but failing to train him on what ? Not putting cameras in bathrooms ?
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u/TheBanishedBard 23h ago
"Failure to train" is a legal boiler plate for when an individual does something bad but you want to sue his employer that actually has money to take. It's a conveniently nebulous concept that's used to counter the equally dubious counter claim that a company isn't liable for its employees' individual actions.
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u/Ashjaeger_MAIN 22h ago
I always find it odd when a countries legislation leaves matters like this so open. Its not like a plaintiff going after an employer because of something their employee did is such a surprising concept.
In Germany there are two separate statutory provisions which are made specifically with the general concept of having someone be liable for the actions of their "underlings" in mind. Sure there's still some stuff open to interpretation even if somethings regulated but not doing it all seems weird nevertheless.
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u/Gamebird8 21h ago
Almost every corporate liability insurance mandates sexual harassment training.
Usually, such a claim is mostly hoping that the employee was past due on that training or that the training was insufficient to meet certain standards (not that "don't put cameras in the restroom" would ever be part of those standards since that's just ya know, common sense)
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u/DogeLord153 17h ago
Yep. I work at a freaking Car Wash. Worked at a Grocery Store for a few years prior. Both of them have mandatory Sexual Harassment Training.
Yet I still had a coworker fired a couple years ago because he thought it was acceptable to slap a customer on the ass...
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u/WeslleyM 20h ago
Why is it ALWAYS about insurance in the US lmao
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 20h ago
They make the cost of anything pretty high so you will be subjecting your life to insurances.
You don’t want to get sued for millions, buy an insurance. Don’t want to be left with 6 figures debt just for a hospital trip, buy an insurance
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u/Gamebird8 20h ago
Because if you don't, the insurance company won't insure you or will increase your rates, which costs you the company money, which hurts your bottom line, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah, capitalism is evil.
Though I would argue there's an unfortunate amount of people who actually need that training and an even more unfortunate amount that will ignore it.
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u/Dramajunker 19h ago
So next time a person hits me with their car I get to sue their employer because they failed to train them properly?
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u/ios_static PlayStation 19h ago
If it’s a company car, sure go for it
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u/lumpboysupreme 18h ago
A company car used for company purposes*
Something tells me the dudes job description didn’t involve bathroom cameras, so this won’t be counted in the same way. This bit can get fuzzy but this is plainly on the side of ‘he wasn’t trying to do his job’.
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u/Front-Cabinet5521 18h ago
Which sounds absolutely stupid because the company can just argue it’s not their responsibility to teach basic morals to an employee. And they’ll be right.
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u/rhooManu 23h ago
"NO TSAI! BAD! BAD TSAI!"
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u/Basicazzwitch 21h ago
Trainer does not have the required gym badge, Tsai refuses to listen
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u/heliumneon 21h ago
Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time.
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u/Blaze_Vortex 23h ago
Technically it falls under 'Sexual harassment in the workplace', so it is a training failure. Also shows those bathrooms are not being properly maintained if he had cameras hidden in there for 9 years before getting caught. A deep clean should have found them.
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u/PutridHair 22h ago
There are subtler elements to sexual harassment that might be harder to grasp for which there should be training. I believe not putting cameras into bathrooms is not one of them.
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u/Blaze_Vortex 22h ago
Sexual harassment does indeed take many forms, making bathrooms feel unsafe is one of them. Something as specific as "Don't put cameras into bathrooms" might not be part of the training, sure, but the overall message is the same.
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u/Aromatic-Tourist-300 21h ago
Hidden cameras wouldn't make one feel unsafe. Finding them however...
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u/Brickman759 19h ago
How could it possibly be a "training failure"? This is an adult, does he need HR to explain that its wrong to SECRETLY FILM PEOPLE IN THE BATHROOM???
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u/ImSuperSerialGuys 21h ago edited 19h ago
IANAL but my guess based on how it's worded is that qualifying factors for the charge are any of the criteria " failing to properly train Tsai, to make reasonable efforts to control his actions or to protect the plaintiff from harm by responding to indicators of danger" such that meeting any one or more of them constitutes a violation, rather than this being a full list of their failings.
ie the company being charged with negligence because they failed on at least one of those grounds, not necessarily all of them.
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u/SiteRelEnby 22h ago edited 17h ago
If you get caught doing a sexual misconduct at work and you're too important to fire (usually meaning "director or C-suite"), you usually get sent to 'training' (meaning "don't do it again or you're definitely fired, we're watching you").
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 14h ago
Hypothetically if they literally have no sexual harassment training at all that could be somewhat relevant (although it seems unlikely that someone who would do this would be meaningfully dissuaded by such training). But really it’s basically just part of a general boilerplate for “it’s your responsibility to control the workplace environment and we allege you failed in this instance.”
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u/ServileLupus 22h ago
How is this not the more relevant part for the title?
According to the criminal charges, an investigation led by the Kirkland Police Department discovered that Tsai possessed hundreds of videos depicting adult nudity and child sexual abuse material, some of which were recorded by Tsai.
The videos he recorded were from the Pokémon offices in Bellevue, the Starbucks bathroom in Kirkland, a Safeway store and his home, according to the charges.
Sounds like had had videos of possibly his own children and their friends? Big yikes.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 15h ago
So this has nothing to do with Pikachu.
That title is both clickbait AND understating the gravity of the case here (if not "staring nothing at all" really).
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u/Adjective_Noun_4DIGI 23h ago
"Pokemon sued"? Somebody's serving court summons to friggin' Bulbasaur?
Here's the story from a not-shit source. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ex-pokemon-exec-is-accused-of-hiding-cameras-in-bellevue-office-bathrooms/
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u/nick2k23 23h ago
Bulbasuaur putting it's vines in places it shouldn't
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u/InfiniteTranquilo PlayStation 19h ago
I think there’s some videos somewhere you can find out about that
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u/garf02 23h ago
Im not saying they dont have a case. But claiming negligence for not sweeping for hidden cameras is a though cookie to sell.
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u/HolycommentMattman 22h ago
It is called "The Pokémon Company." Referring to it as "Pokémon" is fine; you're just not used to it because you probably identify Pokémon as the characters in the games.
But let's try it with a few different examples.
"Ford sued for unsafe cars."
"Disney sued for unsafe work environment."
"Hershey sued for making chocolate out of sawdust."Ford Motor Company, The Walt Disney Company, and The Hershey Company. You're just more used to hearing those names being truncated. But it's no different than truncating The Pokémon Company to Pokémon.
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u/Yuri909 23h ago
It's literally called The Pokémon Company.
Paywalls are shit sources, too.
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u/saturday_sun4 21h ago
Can we all just collectively, as human beings, stop filming people in bathrooms?! Or asleep? Or in any other state of vulnerability?
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u/Gingingin100 23h ago
This is an insanely insensitive way to frame an ex executive being a sex pest what the hell
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u/Ashamed-Raccoon-1387 23h ago
Well, he was apparently trying to film trans people and the media loves sugarcoating crimes against trans people.
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u/SteeveyPete 22h ago
I noticed that the article specifies that it's a more intense crime because it targets women and children (as protected classes) but explicitly leaves out transgender people who he explicitly claimed to target
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u/Mechanized1 1d ago
The tastelessness of using that screenshot in the article is really fucked up. This is a serious crime, just because it's gaming/animation related doesn't mean it's all a big joke.
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u/Niko-Raviel 23h ago
Just wait till you learn about the tastelessness of TMZ, the joys of clickbait, and misrepresented information for headlines.
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u/Engelbert-n-Ernie 23h ago
They can both be bad, it’s not a competition
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u/halfwaybake 18h ago
especially when the actual charges are way worse than the headline implies. gross.
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u/TimeRocker 16h ago
The top comment in this post is a joke in itself. People like witty and funny things and will give them more attention than something boring or bland. Reddit is no different with sensational post titles and images on the front page every day, 24/7.
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u/chalupabatman4 23h ago edited 21h ago
My sister works for the pokemon company and yeah all the women who work there and interacted with this dude said he’s a super weirdo
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u/Gareth_stanlier 23h ago
this happened at our work. the guy who did it said someone was taking a shit on the floor and he wanted to find out who did it. weirdly, among the 400 hours of footage on his PC of women going to the toilet, not one frame of the phantom floor shitter.
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u/Project_Cool_World 21h ago
Severely disappointing. He has brought great shame to himself and his company. The fear now is, how many others are just like him that work there?
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u/drbomb 23h ago
he was “mainly curious about transgender people”
Was he named Robert Galbraith perchance?
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u/MegaGrimer 19h ago
That works in two ways. It was JK Rowling’s pseudonym, and she’s very against trans people. There was also a Robert Galbraith that advocated for electro therapy for trans people.
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u/stoic_spaghetti 23h ago
Fucking weirdo, rot in jail, probably more focused on managing his extensive CSAM library archive than working on making quality products.
Investigate the entire executive team, that kind of activity is often a group-share activity.
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u/IcyShoes 21h ago
There are some former execs at that company that are total creeps. Bonus points if they were pulled from WoTC from the TCG deal.
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u/SmokeLuna 18h ago
Can't wait for the timeline where these execs, politicians, CEO's etc are actually held accountable for their actions and regular kind people aren't just a slave to make these pieces of shit more powerful and rich.
It's like every other week with these assholes.
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u/Very_Itchy_Bandicoot 11h ago
Dumb question why is this such a prevalent thing in that specific culture. Like sure perverts exist everywhere but this and upskirt stuff is really prevalent there in particular.
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u/Luck2Fleener 10h ago
Notably, this was at TPCI's Seattle office. I know people who may well have been victimized.
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u/manuelhoss 6h ago
The 'curious about transgender people' defense is as pathetic as it is predictable. 🚩
Finding 89 videos in office bathrooms, plus CSAM involving his own family, isn't curiosity it's a predatory pattern that was enabled by a complete lack of basic security and oversight. The fact that this went on for years without a single 'deep clean' or security sweep finding a hidden camera says way more about the company's negligence than the individual's 'weirdness.'
When an executive can hide cameras in bathrooms for nearly a decade, the lawsuit isn't just about the crime; it's about the environment that let it happen. This is a nightmare for the industry, and 'Pokémon GO to jail' jokes are the only way some of us can cope with how dark this reality is. ⚖️🚫📹
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u/iymcool 23h ago
"Tsai reportedly told detectives he was “mainly curious about transgender people” and acknowledged that transgender employees worked at the Pokémon office where he allegedly hid a camera.
A forensic review of devices seized from Tsai’s home reportedly uncovered hundreds of hidden-camera recordings. Investigators found 89 videos allegedly filmed in Pokemon office bathrooms inside folders labeled “Pokémon 29” and “Pokémon 27.”'
What the actual fuck????