Coldplay Kiss Cam To Nestle: CEOs Get Derailed By Office Romance

The fraternity of corporate chiefs ousted over an office romance just added a new member. 

Nestlé SA CEO Laurent Freixe lost his job this week after an investigation found he had had an undisclosed romantic relationship with a subordinate. Freixe is not alone. Whether it’s exposed via social media or by a whistleblower, C-Suite dalliances continue to cause turmoil atop some of the world’s biggest companies, raising the question of whether internal corporate alarm systems are working — or not. 

Astronomer CEO Andy Byron lost his job in July, after being caught in a clinch on a stadium ‘kiss cam’ with the technology firm’s chief people officer at a Coldplay concert. That followed the exit of Kohl’s Corp. CEO Ashley Buchanan in May, after the board determined that he had directed millions of dollars of business to a vendor with whom he had an undisclosed romantic relationship.

“It confounds me that in 2025 they think they can get away with this,” said Kabrina Chang, who teaches courses on business ethics and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “I always wonder if they feel untouchable on some level? Like, I won’t get caught, or the rules don’t apply to me?”

CEOs behaving badly is hardly a new trope, but the #MeToo movement — which led to the exit of Les Moonves of CBS and others — put boards under greater pressure to show they investigate any complaints thoroughly. Even consensual relationships can cause problems, particularly when a manager gets involved with a subordinate. More than two-thirds of HR professionals see the perception of favoritism or unfair treatment as their top concern regarding workplace romance, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2025 report. 

Companies can’t wipe out office relationships entirely — after all, many of us meet our future spouses at work and more than half of US employees have dated coworkers, SHRM found — but they do have a duty to keep their workplaces safe and fair. When the CEO is involved, the “risk skyrockets,” according to Andy Challenger, CEO of outplacement and coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“Office dating isn’t suddenly more common,” said Roxanne Bras Petraeus, CEO of Ethena, a workplace compliance-training platform. “What’s new is employees are asking sharper questions about boundaries.” Ethena, which runs some employee hotlines, has seen a sharp rise recently in employee questions about workplace romances. Policies around workplace relationships vary, with only about a third of workers saying their employers demand disclosure, according to a separate SHRM survey.

In Nestlé’s case, the relationship was first brought to company officials’ attention through an internal system called “speak up,” according to a person familiar with the situation. After an initial probe couldn’t substantiate the tip, further concerns were raised via the internal system and the investigation with external counsel was launched, according to the person familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified discussing an internal matter.

Such hotlines where employees can anonymously report issues are common at big employers, with 93% of organizations having one, according to a survey of 284 employers by HR Acuity, a hotline provider. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act required public companies to establish procedures for employees to report potential securities violations, and employees can also use those to report inappropriate behavior.

Once a report is submitted, it typically goes to HR or compliance for investigation. But those probes are not always thorough: Just over half of firms said they use a “required, structured” process, HR Acuity found, while 38% simply follow “suggested” guidelines and 4% just wing it.

“It’s hard to tell how effective they are,” said Laszlo Bock, the former HR chief at Google. “The investigations can be quite deep or shallow, depending on the level of detail the complainant provides.”

And while anonymity encourages more employees to come forward, it can also make it more difficult for the HR department to substantiate claims and confirm details, the HR Acuity report found. 

“Hotlines only work if they’re anonymous and backed by a culture that protects reporters,” Petraeus said, citing a report that found only half of employees actually reported misconduct after witnessing it, with many citing fear of retaliation.

For boards, a boss’s lack of transparency, and not his libido, is often the deciding factor. At BP Plc, where CEO Bernard Looney resigned in 2023 after the oil group’s board reviewed allegations relating to Looney’s past personal relationships in 2022, it later emerged that Looney hadn’t been fully transparent with the previous investigation. He was sacked only after further allegations were received — leading to another investigation. 

Looney was also accused of promoting women with whom he had had undisclosed past relationships, according to the Financial Times. “Mr Looney knowingly misled the board,” the company said in a statement at the time.

“Boards are often in a tough situation when these sorts of lapses occur, especially if the company is otherwise doing well and the ethics policy leaves some room for interpretation,” said Eric Talley, Stern Professor of Law and Business at Columbia University. 

A study of 219 examples of management misdeeds from 1978 to 2012 found nearly half of the instances were reports of sexual indiscretions, ranging from accusations of sexual harassment to an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. The average executive charged with an indiscretion was 52 years old, and 96% were male. 

When the CEO was implicated, the fallout cost shareholders $226 million, the study found.   

“By the time a company’s ethical problems are apparent in the boardroom, they have resulted in a dramatic loss of shareholder value,” the study said. “The collateral damage goes further: at least some shareholders seem to hold board members responsible for indiscretions associated with the firm’s executives.”

That was the case at McDonald’s Corp., whose former boss Steve Easterbrook was ousted in 2019 after having sexual relationships with subordinates. He was later fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for not fully disclosing violations of company policy leading up to his termination. 

Shareholders criticized former McDonald’s chairman Rick Hernandez and other board members for paying Easterbrook severance. The company sued to claw some compensation back after concluding it had been misled about the extent of Easterbrook’s misbehavior. 

In 2024, Norfolk Southern Corp. Chief Executive Officer Alan Shaw was ousted after having a relationship with the company’s chief legal officer, while Intel Corp. boss Brian Krzanich was fired in 2018 after allegations he failed to disclose a past relationship with an employee. 

Still, CEOs rarely lose their jobs for bad behavior, according to data from Exechange.com, which tracks CEO departures at big US companies. Since 2017, when exechange.com began tracking the data, fewer than 2% of 2,542 CEO exits were because of misconduct allegations.

The departure of Freixe marks the eighth unexpected exit of a CEO in the European consumer sector since last September, according to RBC, beginning with Freixe’s appointment to replace former Nestlé boss Mark Schneider. 

“When he took over as CEO just over a year ago following Mark Schneider’s ejection from the role, we thought of him as a Nestlé lifer who would restore the company’s reputation of slightly boring predictability,” wrote RBC Europe analyst James Edwardes Jones in a note. “How wrong we were.”