Cher Scarlett (born ) is an American software engineer, workers' rights activist, and writer who is known for starting #AppleToo. She has organized staff at Apple, Activision Blizzard, and Starbucks.
Scarlett, who has bipolar disorder, experienced struggles in her early life, leading her to drop out of high school and attempt to overdose. Self-taught web development skills from her adolescence in the late 1990s allowed her to overcome a lack of formal education and build a software engineering career after the birth of her child. Scarlett's experiences and observations in a male-dominated occupation led her to become a workers' rights advocate and critic of technology and corporations.
She was a leader of the #AppleToo movement, which gathered and shared stories of mistreatment from current and former Apple employees, and was a founder of Apple Together, a solidarity union, where she remains an advisor. Scarlett also filed complaints against Apple with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. After months of activism at the company, Scarlett resigned with a now-defunct settlement after she says she was harassed, intimidated, and retaliated against. In October 2024, the NLRB prosecutor charged Apple with illegally terminating Scarlett through constructive dismissal. In 2025, Mozilla Corporation settled charges from the NLRB for refusing to hire Scarlett for her labor activism at Apple.
Scarlett has successfully lobbied for labor laws in Washington state. She also advocated for Apple shareholder proposals regarding civil rights and concealment clauses, the first to be approved by the company's shareholders in more than 10 years. The audit into concealment clauses resulted in an overhaul of Apple's employment contracts.
Early life and education Scarlett was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and grew up in Kirkland with her mother, who worked in construction. Her father and step-father were mostly absent from her life. A sister of Scarlett's died at age 30 in 2018. She said she grew up poor, coming from generational poverty in a family of farm laborers that settled in Eastern Washington descended from the Volga Germans.
She attended Juanita High School in the early 2000s, and says she earned a nearly perfect score on the SAT. Scarlett was interested in science and video gaming, and says she wanted to be a scientist and go to space after being a junior astronaut and studying biotechnology while in school. She taught herself to code during middle school, creating a website for her guild in EverQuest and continued experimenting with web development on the blogging platform LiveJournal.
Scarlett experienced sexual abuse at a young age, and when she was in high school began battling drug addiction, eventually dropping out. She later obtained a GED. She experienced an incident of commercial sexual exploitation in 2005, which led her to a suicide attempt. Scarlett later provided information to federal authorities that led to the arrest of one of the perpetrators in 2018. Prior to starting her career, Scarlett worked as a stripper, but she says getting pregnant prompted her to change her life. Scarlett worked in the service industry, including working the overnight shift at Krispy Kreme, while her daughter was young.
In August 2023, Scarlett enrolled in Orange Coast College to study computer science. She temporarily withdrew to attend a 10-week-long domestic violence counseling program and experienced homelessness. She then re-enrolled to study astrophysics and earth science. While in community college, she held positions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. She graduated with honors and multiple associate's degrees in 2026. She transferred to Wellesley College.
Career and activism
2007–2015 In 2007, Scarlett worked briefly in a web development position at a real-estate firm. She worked as a freelance developer until 2011, when she was recruited as a web developer at USA Today, where her manager referred to her as a "talented developer".
Activision Blizzard (2015–2016)
In 2015, Scarlett was hired as a software engineer at Activision Blizzard and worked on their Battle.net platform. While there, she pressed the human resources department on gender-based pay discrimination and sexism she had observed. She said that her manager and she developed the games publisher's first interactive esports brackets and esports data API, and her manager told The Washington Post that she was an "incredibly driven" employee and "shows passion with every project she works on and she doesn't stop until she gets it right."
Scarlett left Blizzard in 2016, and in 2021, provided testimony to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing as part of a lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation. Scarlett encouraged others to come forward, helped direct them to the agency, and later supported a walkout. Scarlett alleged in the amended lawsuit she was groped by Alex Afrasiabi, a former developer of World of Warcraft (WoW), at a work event, who was named as "a blatant example" of Blizzard's "refusal to deal with a harasser because of his seniority/position," and that she had been told by a friend that he had done the same to her the year prior at BlizzCon. Afrasiabi was fired in 2020.
Scarlett spoke publicly about what she alleged to be poor treatment of female employees through underpayment, sexual harassment, and abuse. Scarlett alleged that she was unfairly reprimanded, touched inappropriately, and sexually harassed on a regular basis. Scarlett and others referred to the behavior described in the lawsuit as normalized at the company, Scarlett saying, "this behavior was normal and protected here". She outed the unnamed chief technology officer (CTO) from the lawsuit as Ben Kilgore in a series of tweets, claiming he had been the subject of numerous complaints about inappropriate behavior, some of which had also been reported to authorities years earlier. This was later corroborated by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. Kilgore was terminated in 2018.
She also spoke about what she said was improper handling of a 2018 incident when she outed one of Overwatch League's unpaid moderators for previously hoarding and distributing revenge porn. The moderator was removed from his role without notice, and his public complaints about the company's treatment of volunteer workers went viral, gaining significant sympathy from the community. A few hours later, Scarlett wrote a Medium post about her history with the moderator, dating back to 2012 when Twitch was still small and she livestreamed WoW. The moderator initially denied the allegations, but later retracted his denial and apologized. Blizzard later dissolved community moderation teams.
Scarlett criticized working in a "dream job" like Blizzard. She said that because of the sacrifices employees make to get there, "you ignore everything that's happening because you want to be there so badly" and "you stop seeing things that are bad as bad." The company said it appreciated Scarlett's bravery in coming forward, and said they were prioritizing equity and safety in the workplace.
2016–2020
Scarlett joined World Wide Technology in 2016, working there until 2017, when she was recruited at Starbucks as a lead software engineer, where she worked remotely from Greater St. Louis, Missouri. At Starbucks, she joined a successful campaign to address gender-based pay disparities. After leaving in 2019 to work at Webflow, she wrote about what she alleged to be a practice at Starbucks of paying lower wages to workers in areas that were predominantly Black or had high proportions of underrepresented groups. She continued to write, primarily advocating for equity in tech, and became a maintainer for a website that advocates for healthy work–life balance in tech, 1x.engineer, a play on the heavily stereotyped idea of a "10x engineer".
Apple (2020–2021)
In April 2020, Scarlett began working as a principal software engineer on Apple's software security team, where she worked remotely from St. Louis, and later, the Seattle metropolitan area.
A year into her employment, Scarlett got involved in workplace activism in the company's Slack, which was repeatedly leaked to the press. Scarlett became the most vocal, public-facing advocate for workplace issues at Apple, where employees previously rarely spoke to the media, especially about the company's "unprecedented" secretive culture. Scarlett was credited for inspiring others to speak out, but was also criticized for breaking the company's unwritten rules, such as not speaking unsolicited about Apple publicly. She said that while hundreds of people asked for help with concerns around pay equity, discrimination, and restrictive remote work policies, she was also accused of ruining the company's culture. Scarlett said that Apple's "cult-like" and "self-policing" culture of loyalty and secrecy has discouraged employees from speaking out, and told The New York Times, "Never have I met people more terrified to speak out against their employer".
Scarlett was pressured into requesting medical leave in September 2021, and said that harassment from colleagues affected her mental health. She said that while discussing her request, Apple asked her to stop discussing the company publicly tweeting that executives said she was "giving them a lot of headaches". She said she felt forced to comply, and was subsequently granted paid time off (PTO) instead of medical leave. Scarlett described several incidents of harassment from colleagues at Apple, including a "nasty email" from a teammate she tried unsuccessfully to address with their manager, accusations of leaking confidential information, anonymous hateful messages on various platforms, obscene submissions to her compensation survey, and an incident of doxing on Blind. Though the company helped her take safety precautions, Scarlett said that Apple enabled the abuse by not condemning the behavior.
On November 19, 2021, after briefly returning to work, Scarlett quit, later alleging she was isolated, intimidated and retaliated against, after filing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaints against the company.
Antonio García Martínez In May 2021, Scarlett tweeted that she was "gutted" by the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, and that she "believe[d] in leadership to do the right thing". García Martínez had previously written in a book that women in the Bay Area were "soft and weak, cosseted and naive". Scarlett edited a letter that a group of employees had drafted to send to management, which spoke out against the hire as not being aligned with Apple's diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies and made a list of demands. After the letter leaked to the press, Scarlett's tweet about García Martínez appeared in Bloomberg, which she said triggered an onset of abuse, based on misconceptions that she had written the letter.
Scarlett said she was contacted by the company's public relations department, who seemed only interested in suppressing bad publicity. She gave a quote to CNN, saying she "trust[ed] in Apple's culture", but the hire was "starkly contradictory" of her feelings. Garcia Martinez was quickly fired, and Apple commented that "Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place [at Apple]."
Remote work advocacy