Former Google chief accused of spying on employees through account ‘backdoor’

When Michelle Ritter, a law student and MBA at Columbia University, met former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2020, she said she wanted to pitch a potential investment in a sports technology startup she had developed.

That dinner turned into much more, a romantic and business partnership in which she says the 70-year-old billionaire invested more than $100 million in a jointly owned tech incubator — before it all fell apart.

Now, Ritter accuses Schmidt of stealing her business, sexually assaulting her twice during their relationship and exploiting her Google background to hack into her emails and online computer files, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“During their relationship, Schmidt confided that when he worked at Google, he built an internal ‘backdoor’ to Google’s servers with a team of Google engineers in order to spy on Google employees. As a result, the backdoor allowed him to access anyone’s Google account and private information,” the lawsuit states.

Google is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit and is accused of “knowingly acquiescing in, failing to remediate, and materially assisting in unauthorized access” to Ritter’s accounts despite notice. Schmidt and the company are accused of violating California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, as well as a section of the state’s penal code that prohibits wiretapping.

Patricia Glaser, an attorney representing Schmidt, called the lawsuit “yet another desperate and destructive effort to publish false and defamatory statements in order to evade accountability for an existing arbitration of a commercial dispute.”

Glaser added: “The assertions made here are directly contradicted by her own words…and are merely a final Hail Mary to save her from the consequences of her own actions. We are confident that we will prevail on the specific legal issue that will compel arbitration and refute these pathetic, fabricated allegations.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The complaint is the latest filing in litigation that dates back to at least December 2024, when Ritter sought a domestic violence restraining order against Schmidt. She later withdrew it after reaching a financial agreement with Schmidt, with whom she launched the New York high-tech incubator with offices in Los Angeles, according to court records.

In her new lawsuit, Ritter alleges that Schmidt failed to honor the settlement because of false accusations that she was the source of a media leak. She is seeking to have the settlement, which requires arbitration of disputes, thrown out.

Schmidt’s lawyers called his legal filings a “gross abuse of the justice system” and a “transparent hit piece designed to smear and defame” Schmidt, according to court records. He is seeking to resolve the dispute through arbitration.

Several files in the case are under seal and many documents are heavily redacted. The lawsuit seeks at least $100 million in damages, with the next hearing set for December 4. She is represented by the law office of prominent Los Angeles attorney Skip Miller.

Schmidt was chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011, then chairman of the Silicon Valley company and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., until 2017. He owns stock in parent company Alphabet worth about $14 billion, giving him a net worth of about $34 billion, according to Forbes. He owns several homes in greater Los Angeles.

In the December 2024 restraining order request, Ritter alleged that she lived in an “absolute digital surveillance system” and that Schmidt directed her affiliates to steal her corporate website, take control of her digital business records and have personal investigators follow her parents, according to a court filing.

The request for a restraining order also asked the judge to order Schmidt not to assault her “sexually or otherwise.”

The lawsuit filed Wednesday provides more details about their business ventures and alleges a personal relationship that developed to the point where Schmidt promised to marry her and have children, despite their 39-year age gap.

The lawsuit says their Steel Perlot business was a success, with Schmidt investing more than $100 million in the accelerator and its startups in AI, crypto and other industries — prompting Schmidt to wrest control of the company and its operations away from him.

The media suggests otherwise. Forbes wrote that the company was cash-strapped in 2003 and needed millions of dollars from Schmidt to cover salaries and other expenses.

The lawsuit alleges that Schmidt became violent as the relationship progressed and that he “forcibly raped” her while on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in November 2021 and had sex with her without her consent during the Burning Man festival in Nevada in August 2023.

Schmidt, married for more than 40 years, has been linked romantically in the media to a series of much younger women.

The bitter dispute with Ritter echoes another business disagreement he had with public relations executive Marcy Simon, with whom he had a two-decade relationship that ended in 2014. It also involved a troubled joint venture, according to a New York Times report. The report did not involve complaints of sexual assault.

Schmidt gained notoriety in Silicon Valley, serving as a technical adviser to the Obama administration and the military, testifying on artificial intelligence on Capitol Hill and donating more than $1 billion to charity.

He also co-owns the Washington Commanders football team and has built a real estate portfolio estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars.

Schmidt reportedly spent $110 million this year on the 56,000-square-foot Holmby Hills mansion built by the late producer Aaron Spelling. In 2021, he acquired a 15,000-square-foot Bel Air estate previously owned by the Hilton family, where court records indicate Ritter lived at the time she filed the restraining order.

Schmidt earlier this year took a majority stake in Relativity Space, a Long Beach startup founded in 2015 with the intention of bringing 3D manufacturing to rockets.

However, the company has since changed its focus and Schmidt indicated in a social media post that its interest could be linked to launching AI data centers in space due to their enormous power requirements.