'Misogyny Is Rampant': Ashley Kosak Says Male SpaceX Co-Workers Routinely Groped Her

Ashley Kosak, a former SpaceX engineer, recently published an essay where she said that "misogyny is rampant" at the company and alleged that several of her male co-workers groped her on several different occasions.

According to the essay, which was published on the Lioness website, Kosak began working as an intern with SpaceX in 2017 and in 2019 she joined the company full-time as a "build reliability engineer." She was later promoted to mission integration engineer, the essay said.

Lioness is the same website where Blue Origin employees published an essay alleging a toxic workplace environment at the space exploration company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

As the essay continues, Kosak discusses an incident that occurred shortly after she started as an intern.

"A fellow intern approached me in our intern housing and grabbed my butt while I was washing my dishes," Kosak wrote. "I reported the incident to a superior and another colleague, but the matter was never brought to HR. I had to continue living in the residence with this man."

According to Kosak, similar incidents occurred over the next two years as she continued to work as a SpaceX engineer. She claimed that during a team bonding event in 2018, a male co-worker ran his hand over her shirt "from my lower waist to my chest."

"I told my supervisors what he had done, then met with HR and reported the inappropriate behavior, but no one followed up. This man remained part of the team I reported to and worked for. Given my tenuous position at the company, I felt powerless," Kosak said.

Kosak's essay also discussed similar incidents that occurred over the past year, such as male SpaceX employees who hug female employees without consent and pressure female employees to dance with them. Kosak even alleged that while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, male workers made sexual advances on her by messaging her Instagram account and calling her phone at 4 a.m.

"Another coworker came to my house and insisted on touching me even when I repeatedly requested we stay professional," Kosak wrote in the essay.

Kosak explained that she reported all of the sexual harassment incidents to human resources (HR) but "nothing was done."

"I recorded a meeting I had with HR, because I found it so unbelievable that there was no system in place to deal with this behavior. In the end, nothing happened—except I was given a warning that recording the meeting was in violation of SpaceX policy and Florida law," Kosak wrote. "Each and every man who harassed me was tolerated despite the company's so-called no-tolerance and no a**hole policy."

According to Kosak, she eventually submitted a complaint to SpaceX's anonymous Ethics and Compliance tip line, but noted that the tip line was actually not anonymous and allowed administrators to see who submitted it.

Kosak also wrote how she eventually met with COO Gwynne Shotwell and Head of HR Brian Bjelde to detail her experiences, but they both said that they were never informed of her complaints "and said that executive-level leadership is not involved in discussions of the frequency of this issue within their departments."

Kosak eventually quit the company in November and while speaking with Fortune before the publication of her essay, she called SpaceX "a bros' club."

"If you're able to be part of the social atmosphere, it's really helpful for your career. But if you're a woman, you're only seen as a potential dating option," Kosak told Fortune.

At the end of her essay, Kosak wrote that the last she heard from SpaceX was that new interns would be receiving training on how to report sexual harassment incidents, but noted that "The harassers, on the other hand, have still not been held to account."

The publication of Kosak's essay comes shortly after SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was named Time's Person of the Year.

Newsweek reached out to SpaceX for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.