Facciolla, who started working at Rivian in 2017, claims in his lawsuit that Hammoud would regularly “angrily humiliate” employees. This created a toxic culture that led to employees overworking themselves out of fear of Hammoud’s reprisals, according to Facciolla’s complaint.
Just before Christmas in 2022, according to Facciolla’s lawsuit, employees on his team were working 12-to-14 hour days for three weeks straight. One day, Hammoud allegedly got angry that another employee left the office to take care of their sick child. The chief designer then allegedly started “aggressively carving up” Facciolla’s clay model of one of Rivian’s vehicles in response, making “major changes that are typically made in the early phases” of the car development process.
Later that evening, when Facciolla told Hammoud he needed to go home because his wife was working a night shift at the hospital, Hammoud allegedly asked: “Is she a hooker now?”