The civil suit, filed last week in California’s San Mateo County Superior Court on behalf of Amber Baptiste, claims Goguen is responsible “for years of physical abuse, emotional trauma, and damage to her health”.
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A Silicon Valley investment exec is denying allegations that he sexually and physically abused a trafficked woman for 13 years, and then reneged on a promise to pay her $40 million to keep quiet.
Ms. Baptiste’s lawyers are Patricia L. Glaser and G. Jill Basinger from Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro, LLP of Los Angeles.
Goguen, of Sequoia Capital, has recently resigned over the allegations, an action the firm called the “appropriate course of action” in a recent statement.
Goguen, whose partner page on Sequoia’s website now goes to an error, had been with the firm since 1996, focusing on the energy and security sectors and sitting on the board of more than a dozen companies.
Sequoia Capital, where Goguen worked for nearly 20 years, parted ways with him once Baptiste’s suit became public.
Baptiste’s lawsuit claims Goguen also paid Baptiste’s living expenses and other costs, including medical bills, for over a decade in exchange for maintaining their sexual relationship.
Baptiste sued Goguen for breach of contract.
“Upon learning of these allegations, New Day for America decided we will donate Michael Goguen’s contribution in its entirety to organizations committed to ending human trafficking”, Connie Wehrkamp, a spokeswoman for the super-PAC, told Yahoo News.
The suit also says that Baptiste discovered in 2011 that Goguen infected her with “several high-risk strains” of HPV, and that in 2012 she underwent emergency surgery for a ruptured anal canal “after Mr. Goguen forcibly sodomized her and left her bleeding and alone on the floor of a hotel room in a foreign country”. The suit says they were together while he was married to three different women and that he paid her money through two sham companies for many years. But, according to Baptiste, after paying an initial $10m, he refused to fulfill the rest of the agreement, said to be able to “break [Baptiste] free of the human traffickers who held her in perpetual debt”. The filing includes pictures of a scantily-clad woman – allegedly Amber Baptiste – as well as text messages that Amber Baptiste allegedly sent him. Her legal filing alleges that Goguen rented Baptiste from a group of sex-slave traffickers; that Goguen began a relationship with Baptiste while she was a minor; and that he knowingly infected her with a sexually transmitted disease.
“He’s going to be vigorously defending himself”, said Diane Doolittle, Goguen’s attorney with the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in Redwood Shores, Calif.
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Goguen and Baptiste allegedly met at a Texas strip club and struck up a relationship, which the initial complaint describes in detail as “abusive” and the cross-complaint describes as a “kind and mutually loving relationship”.
