YouTube personality Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson has continuously made headlines for questionable “Squid Game”-like viral videos, from challenging a stuntman to risk their life inside a burning house to Stanford Prison Experiment-esque challenges. Beyond morally dubious stunts, the allegations against Donaldson and his media empire, Beast Industries, continue to rack up, from claims of philanthropy fraud to allegations of racist remarks and “inappropriate sexual comments to minors.” Most recently, Lorrayne Mavromatis, who worked as a Beast Industries executive between 2022 and 2025, has filed a lawsuit against her former employer, alleging sexual harassment and workplace gender bias.
She claims she was fired shortly after filing workplace complaints, within three weeks of returning from maternity leave. “It felt surreal to get the opportunity to work there,” she told the New York Times. “But it didn’t really take long for me to see that things were not exactly how I saw them from the outside.” The details, as laid out in the federal lawsuit filed in a North Carolina court, sound pretty bad.
The suit claims MrBeast “did not have an Employee handbook” and instead relied on a typo-ridden document titled “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production” that claims “it’s okay for the boys to be childish” and that it’s okay if “talent wants to draw a dick on the white board in the video or do something stupid.” The handbook even tells employees that “No Does Not Mean No,” according to the lawsuit, and that the “amount of hours you work is irrelevant.” Mavromatis allegedly watched “other female employees be subjected to sexual harassment that was both condoned and/or perpetuated by their supervisors,” including former CEO James Warren “commenting on the way she looked in her clothes.” “When she asked why Donaldson would not work with her on certain projects, Warren told her that she is a beautiful woman and her appearance had a certain sexual effect on Jimmy,” the document reads. Mavromatis also alleges that she was never notified of her labor rights when it came to her maternal leave in 2025, as laid out in the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), a US labor law that requires employers to provide employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year for family reasons, including birth.
Legal experts were baffled by the extent of the allegations. “There isn’t much to do here as legal analysis,” civil rights lawyer Joshua Erlich wrote in a post on Bluesky. “This is a company run by children.
They allegedly treat women differently as a matter of policy, have no complaint process, demote people who engage in protected activity, and fired this woman when she came back from FMLA.” “If true, he’s f***ed,” Erlich added. Beast Industries representative Gaude Paez has called the allegations as being “categorically false” in a statement to the NYT, denying that the company’s handbook included the language the lawsuit quoted. Doubling down, an unnamed representative called Mavromatis’ claims a “clout-chasing complaint” which is “built on deliberate misrepresentations,” in a statement to the BBC. The news comes less than two years after MrBeast’s “Beast Games” reality competition came under fire in 2024, with a group of contestants alleging they had been exposed to “dangerous circumstances and conditions.” In her lawsuit, Mavromatis claims “male executives laughed and made jokes at the office about female contestants of Beast Games who complained they did not have access to feminine hygiene products and clean underwear while participating in the show.” More on MrBeast: Kalshi Says It’s Busted a MrBeast Staffer for Insider Trading
