Beast Industries, the $5 billion media conglomerate founded by YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, is being sued by a former employee who says she was sexually harassed, discriminated against as a woman, and fired shortly after returning from maternity leave.
The company refutes her claims, saying it has evidence, including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony, that contradict the allegations.
The federal lawsuit, filed on April 22 in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina, paints a picture of Beast Industries as a boys’ club in which women are excluded from male-dominated meetings, demeaned in front of colleagues, and told to “shut up,” while men are allowed “to be childish.”
“This clout-chasing complaint is built on deliberate misrepresentations and categorically false statements, and we have the receipts to prove it,” a spokeswoman for Beast Industries said in a statement shared with Fast Company. “We will not submit to opportunistic lawyers looking to manufacture a payday from us.”
The former employee, Lorrayne Mavromatis, was hired in 2022 and terminated in 2025, less than three weeks after returning from maternity leave, per the lawsuit. Before that, the suit alleges, she had been demoted for complaining about sexual harassment and what she believed was a hostile work environment for her and other women. The company denies Mavromatis was demoted.
According to the lawsuit, the company distributed a document titled “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production,” which included statements such as “It’s okay for the boys to be childish” and “The amount of hours you work is irrelevant.”
The company says that document is not an employee handbook, but a production guidebook; it was previously leaked in 2024.
Mavromatis says she was sexually harassed by her supervisors, including being made to meet then-CEO James Warren at his home, where he commented on her clothing.
Mavromatis was also left out of projects because, per the lawsuit, Warren told her she was “a beautiful woman” and that her “appearance had a certain sexual effect on Jimmy,” referring to Donaldson, aka MrBeast.
“Jimmy gets really awkward around beautiful women,” Warren told her, according to the lawsuit. “Let’s just say that when you’re around and he goes to the restroom, he’s not actually using the restroom.”
The company spokeswoman called this allegation “ridiculous,” saying it’s an exploitation of Donaldson’s medical conditions, including Crohn’s disease and an eye condition.
It wasn’t only female employees who were subject to degradation, the suit alleges. Male executives also made jokes about female contestants of the MrBeast and Amazon MGM Studios game show Beast Games when they “complained they did not have access to feminine hygiene products and clean underwear while participating in the show,” per the filing. The company did not comment on the record about this allegation.
In 2024, Beast Games contestants raised issues with the production, saying that they hadn’t received adequate food or medical care, and that some contestants were injured, leaving the competition area via stretchers.
Mavromatis’s suit also claims that her experience working with MrBeast included discrimination over her pregnancy. She says when she told her manager she would need maternity leave in “early 2025,” she was never informed about her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
A digital copy of an employee handbook was shared with Fast Company by Beast Industries that includes mention of parental leave and FMLA, and which says the document was last updated in March 2025.
Per the lawsuit, Mavromatis was asked to work while on leave for her pregnancy. Under FMLA, it’s illegal for a company to force or coerce or require an employee to perform work while on leave. However, the suit states that Mavromatis feared “retaliation . . . and other negative consequences on her employment” if she refused, even joining a conference call while in the delivery room.
Beast Industries says there was no such expectation, sharing screenshots of messages that the company says show Mavromatis being told not to join the conference call while in labor, and that Mavromatis herself asked to work while on leave; Fast Company could not immediately verify the messages.
Less than three weeks after returning to work from maternity leave, the lawsuit says, Mavromatis was fired. The company spokeswoman says this was not performance related but part of a broader restructuring.
MrBeast’s YouTube page has 479 million subscribers, making it the most-subscribed-to channel on the video platform. Beast Industries, which has more than 500 employees, runs several other businesses, including snack brand Feastables, lunch kit company Lunchly, fintech app Step, Beast Philanthropy, and more.
