An Apple engineer who left the company last week after thousands of co-workers signed a petition calling for him to be sacked said on Twitter he was fired "in a snap decision" and that Apple made defamatory statements about him.
Apple said Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager who joined its advertising business in April, was no longer with the company.
The iPhone maker made the move after more than 2000 of its employees signed an internal petition objecting to what they denounced as sexist and racist views in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys about working in Silicon Valley.
In the book, Martínez called women in the Bay area of San Francisco "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit".
"They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel," he continued.
In addition to those statements, he also came under fire when comparing a co-worker named Chander to a rickshaw driver.
"In his ill-fitting polyester polo shirts with colour palettes stolen from the late seventies, he reminded me of the bored auto-rickshaw drivers in front of Connaught Place, Delhi, who'd overcharge you a hundred rupees to go down the street to Paharganj," he wrote.
Announcing his departure, Apple said it strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace and that "behaviour that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here".
On Twitter, García Martínez said Apple had been well aware of his writing and had interviewed references he provided to the company about the differences between his professional and literary personas.
"I did not 'part ways' with Apple. I was fired by Apple in a snap decision," García Martínez said on Twitter. "Apple has issued a statement that clearly implies there was some negative behaviour by me during my time at Apple. That is defamatory and categorically false."
Apple did not immediately return a request for comment on García Martínez's posts.
Reuters/Newshub
