The Rape Culture eXp World Holdings Chose to Keep

The Non-Financial Ledger

There is no spreadsheet for what the women at the center of this case lost. There is no line item for what it costs to realize that the company you work for, the one whose events you attended, whose culture you bought into, whose top earners you were encouraged to emulate and recruit for, decided your suffering was worth less than a revenue-share payment.

These were real estate agents. They were building businesses. They were attending company events because that is what you do when you are trying to grow your career inside a network that rewards recruitment. They were not, by any stretch, walking into harm. They were drugged. According to the court record, Bjorkman and Golden traveled together to events specifically to drug female agents and recruits, render them incapacitated, record them, and then sexually assault them. The recordings, the court record says, were used to coerce silence.

One agent reported that Bjorkman told her, in 2019, to stay away from Golden because Golden would drug and rape her. The board of directors of a publicly traded company was made aware of this in an eleven-page memo in October 2020 and did nothing that constituted a meaningful response. When one agent emailed the board directly in April 2022, describing Rohypnol as part of the company’s “corporate culture” and asking for a simple change of sponsorship so she would no longer be financially tied to her attacker, the Compliance Committee denied it. The official reason logged in the minutes was the potential “negative impact to six eXp agents, and Michael Bjorkman who is in vested retirement status.”

That sentence is the whole story. The company’s internal system looked at a survivor’s request to be separated from her rapist’s financial network and decided the rapist’s retirement benefits were the relevant concern.

The person who tried hardest to force the board to act was a director, a woman who served as eXp’s own diversity and inclusion consultant. She spent time over the Easter weekend, she later wrote to her fellow directors, listening to the “insidious details” of what survivors reported. She compiled their accounts. She presented concrete recommendations at board meetings. She was told to mind her business. She was not put up for re-election and left the board in September 2022. The agents who came forward did not stop coming forward. Twenty reported their experiences to this director. She raised it, formally, twice, in board meetings. Neither time was it recorded in the official minutes.

The women who eventually sued in federal court in 2023 did so under anti-trafficking laws. That is not an exaggeration of what happened. That is what the legal system determined fit the documented conduct. And the board’s response to even that, suspending Golden the day after the first lawsuit was filed, only after he had just qualified for lifetime vested revenue-share status, is its own kind of answer about what the company valued.

Legal Receipts

These quotes come directly from the January 16, 2026 Delaware Court of Chancery opinion in Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System v. Sanford, C.A. No. 2024-0998-KSJM, and from documents cited within that opinion.

“Bjorkman and Golden systematically harassed, drugged, assaulted, and raped agents at eXp events dating back to at least 2018. Dozens of other eXp agents participated in or knew of the conduct.”

• This is the court’s own characterization of the complaint’s allegations at the pleading stage. The word “systematically” is load-bearing: this was organized, repeated, coordinated behavior conducted at official company events, not isolated incidents.
• The court’s reference to dozens of agents who “participated in or knew of the conduct” establishes that this was not a secret kept by two bad actors. It was a culture, documented across multiple years and multiple events.

“Allowing the change would move [Agent Five] to a completely new revenue share line, causing potential negative impact to six eXp agents, and Michael Bjorkman who is in vested retirement status.”

• This is the official language of the May 3, 2022 Compliance Committee minutes, describing a rape survivor’s request to change sponsors. The committee acknowledged the financial impact to Bjorkman but, per the court’s finding, omitted any discussion of Agent Five’s references to “sexual abuse,” eXp’s rape drug-fueled “corporate culture,” or her repeated attempts to alert the company.
• This document is the most direct written evidence that the company’s internal process actively weighed a perpetrator’s retirement benefits against a survivor’s safety and chose the perpetrator’s financial interests.

“Rohypnol[,] the rape drug[,] has become part of the eXp corporate culture.”

• This is Agent Five’s direct language in her April 20, 2022 email to the full board, which the court found constituted a “red flag” that directors were legally obligated to act on. The email named specific events, specific dates, and specific individuals.
• The court found that defendants’ characterization of this email as “conclusory rhetoric” was “specious,” and that any reasonable board would have taken it seriously or at minimum asked for more detail.

“Sanford, attempting to minimize the issue, told the Whistleblower that ‘this was not their problem and would be simply a three-to-five day newspaper phenomenon and then would disappear.'”

• Sanford’s response to a director who had collected 20 survivor accounts and was requesting an independent investigation was to predict the story would vanish in a few days. He said this after having personally received Agent Five’s emails describing Bjorkman placing a roofie in her hand.
• This statement is central to the court’s finding that it is “reasonably conceivable” Sanford actively covered up the misconduct for personal financial reasons, since Bjorkman and Golden were both in his revenue-share downline.

“The eXp Leadership Team had a longstanding culture, their pattern and practice, of creating an environment that allowed these assaults, then silencing those whose accounts of sexual harassment and assault would impact profit.”

• This language comes from the California federal court’s January 2024 decision sustaining the first anti-trafficking suit against eXp. The Delaware court cited it as part of the broader record establishing the plausibility of the fiduciary breach claims.
• The phrase “impact profit” is key. The federal court found a plausible inference that suppression of assault reports was specifically linked to protecting revenue streams, not simply to avoiding bad press.

“Miles told the Whistleblower that Conord had not retired. Rather, he had been asked to leave because he had been having an affair with a subordinate and sending sexually explicit pictures to subordinates to pressure them into having sex with him. Miles also told the Whistleblower that this information was ‘hush hush.'”

• Miles, a board member and Audit Committee Chair, had personal knowledge of Conord’s misconduct but described it as a secret rather than a compliance matter requiring board action. This establishes that the pattern of concealment extended beyond Sanford to other named directors.
• The court found that Miles also knew Conord was present in a hotel room where women were being drugged and assaulted, and yet characterized Conord’s only error as staying past 11:00 p.m. as a married man. This framing treated the presence of drugging and assault as normal background to an inconvenient social situation.

How Long the Board Knew Before It Acted

The following timeline maps documented events from the first reported assault to the first meaningful legal action. Every date is sourced from the court record.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

The company’s multi-level revenue-share model did not just create a financial incentive to look the other way. According to the court record, it created a direct cash payment to executives for every dollar their downline agents generated. That meant that protecting the perpetrators was, literally, protecting income.

• CEO Glenn Sanford’s quarterly cash bonus was explicitly structured to equal what he would have received from the revenue-share program, even after he stopped formally participating. Bjorkman, Golden, and top recruiter Brent Gove were all in Sanford’s downline, generating income that flowed upward to him through this mechanism.
• In 2020, board member Eugene Frederick received nearly $3.9 million in cash and stock through the revenue-share program. Bjorkman, Golden, and Gove were also in Frederick’s downline. Frederick was quoted in an online webinar saying he and Gove “probably recruited more people in the Company” than any other Influencers.
• In 2021, then-President Jason Gesing earned $545,506 through the revenue-share program. Gesing was on the board and received the eleven-page memo about Bjorkman and Golden’s conduct.
• When survivors pressed for Golden’s termination in September 2020, Sanford declined. The reason documented in the court record: recruiter Gove threatened to pull his entire team, which represented roughly one-fifth of the company’s agents. Sanford agreed to terminate Bjorkman only, as a compromise to appease Gove.
• The Compliance Committee approved an “Accelerated Compensation Agreement” for Bjorkman despite his having been with the company for less than the three years normally required for vesting. This guaranteed him continued revenue-share payments even after termination for “inappropriate behaviors.” The company has paid out at least $1 million to Bjorkman under this agreement, according to the complaint.
• Golden was not suspended until the day after the first federal anti-trafficking lawsuit was filed in February 2023. He had qualified for revenue-share vesting just days before. The company continues to pay Golden under the revenue-share arrangement.

The Whistleblower Tax

The one person inside eXp who fought hardest for survivors was punished for it.

• The individual identified in court documents as the Whistleblower was a board director who also served as eXp’s diversity and inclusion consultant. She received accounts from 20 survivors reporting drugging and sexual assault. She raised these issues with the board at two separate board meetings, describing reports of rape, sexual assault, and drugging. Neither time was her report recorded in the meeting minutes.
• In April 2022, she sent a detailed memo to all board members, including Sanford, Miles, Cahir, Gesing, and Frederick, recommending seven specific actions: an independent investigation by an outside law firm, sponsorship changes for survivors, a zero-tolerance policy statement, an independent whistleblower hotline, a review of the “revenue share for life” policy that allowed terminated agents to keep earning, outreach to agents, and a women’s leadership initiative.
• Board members including Sanford and Miles told her, on at least two occasions, to mind her business. The board did not adopt any of her seven recommendations.
• After she raised the misconduct and urged action, Miles and Bramble informed her she was being put on “whistleblower status” and warned her there would be a backlash. Before she came forward, she had been asked to stay on the board. After she came forward, the Governance Committee, which included Miles, decided not to put her up for re-election. Her term expired in June 2022, and she was gone.
• The court found that eXp’s own Ethics Code prohibited retaliation against anyone who reported compliance violations. The company removed the one person exercising that function from the board and replaced her with non-parties.

Public Deception

eXp published written policies promising a safe, complaint-responsive environment. The documented record shows a sustained gap between those commitments and how the company actually operated.

• Claimed: The company’s Policies and Procedures stated: “All reported or suspected occurrences of harassment will be promptly and thoroughly investigated. Any Agent that is found to have harassed another Agent, employee, client, customer or any member of the public shall be immediately, and without warning, released from eXp.” Reality: Bjorkman was not immediately released. He was terminated for “inappropriate behaviors” but given an Accelerated Compensation Agreement ensuring his revenue-share income vested. Golden was not released at all for more than two years after the board first learned of his conduct.
• Claimed: The Ethics Code stated the company was “firmly committed to providing equal opportunity” and would “not tolerate any illegal discrimination or harassment of any kind.” Reality: At the November 2020 Audit Committee meeting, Sanford, Cahir, and Bramble all stated they were unaware of any material allegations of discrimination, despite the fact that a viral post, multiple survivor reports, and an eleven-page memo describing serial rape had already surfaced.
• Claimed: The company had a Whistleblower Policy with an anonymous hotline to protect reporters from retaliation. Reality: The anonymous email system was accessible only to employees, not agents. HR and the Director of Diversity and Employee Success were not permitted to process anonymous complaints from agents. Few agents knew the system existed, and those who did said they did not trust it.
• Claimed: When the board launched an investigation in April 2022, it was presented as a response to the concerns raised. Reality: Outside counsel had explicitly recommended an independent investigation by a national law firm with subject-matter expertise. Instead, the board launched an internal investigation led by five eXp employees, including two officers, including individuals who had been involved in denying Agent Five’s sponsorship change request. The Whistleblower described this as the “Foxes guarding the hen house approach” that outside counsel had specifically warned against.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay: Time as a Corporate Weapon

The chronology of eXp’s response is itself an indictment. Every month the board waited was a month during which perpetrators continued to accumulate vested financial rights, and survivors remained trapped in those perpetrators’ revenue-share lines.

• The board knew of the September 2020 viral post, Bjorkman’s arrest, and the Bjorkman-related termination. The board’s Audit Committee met on November 2, 2020, and all members stated they were unaware of any material allegations. The first mention of the drugging, rape, or sexual assault allegations in any board or committee minutes did not appear until the May 3, 2022 Compliance Committee minutes; more than 18 months after the viral post and the eleven-page memo.
• The board launched an internal investigation at some point after April 2022, approximately two years after the board received the eleven-page memo via CEO Gesing. That two-year delay was not a period of secret careful review. During it, the board approved Conord’s departure package on false pretenses, then welcomed Conord back to the company in early 2022 with the announcement “Guess who’s back. The man is back.”
• Golden was allowed to continue at eXp for more than two years and four months after the board first had documented knowledge of his alleged conduct in fall 2020. He qualified for lifetime vested revenue-share status in February 2023. He was suspended the day after the first anti-trafficking lawsuit was filed, once that vesting was secured.
• Agent Five’s initial request to change sponsors was denied on April 18, 2022. The official reason cited in writing was the permanent nature of the sponsorship contract and the financial impact on Bjorkman’s vested retirement. A survivor was held in her attacker’s financial orbit by contract language until outside legal pressure forced a change.
• The internal investigation, launched against outside counsel’s explicit advice regarding independence, produced no documented changes to eXp policy, according to the court record. According to the Delaware court, by the time the anti-trafficking suits were filed, the board had changed no eXp policy and enacted none of the Whistleblower’s reform suggestions.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health and Survivor Safety

The harm documented here was not incidental to eXp’s business. It was sustained, organized, and occurred at official company events designed to grow the company’s agent network.

• At least 20 agents reported experiences of drugging or sexual assault to the Whistleblower alone. The federal anti-trafficking suits were filed by at least five named plaintiffs across two California actions and one Nevada action, drawing from accounts of more than 30 current and former agents, per the New York Times exposé.
• Bjorkman and Golden are alleged to have used recordings of their victims to coerce silence. Survivors therefore faced not only the assault itself but an ongoing coercive relationship designed to prevent reporting.
• Agent Five was denied a sponsorship change that would have removed her from Bjorkman’s financial network. She remained trapped in the revenue-share line of the man who, per her account, placed a drug in her hand and told her to take it. This trap was enforced by a contract clause that the company cited in writing as its reason for denying her request.
• Survivors who came forward reported fear of bullying and retaliation by leaders in their revenue-share organizations. The Whistleblower’s memo documented that agents were “not coming forward out of shame, fear of being bullied and retaliated against by leaders in their rev share organization.” The structural design of the company ensured that perpetrators’ networks had economic leverage over survivors.
• Agent One was told by Bjorkman in 2019 to stay away from Golden because Golden would drug and rape her. She then reported to eXp’s compliance department that Bjorkman had raped her in April 2019. She also reported that a woman being recruited at a February 2019 event had been drugged and transported to a hospital. None of this surfaced in board meeting minutes.

Economic Inequality

eXp’s multi-level compensation structure ensured that economic power flowed to the top of the network while economic vulnerability concentrated at the bottom, where survivors operated.

• Agents at eXp are classified as independent contractors, not employees. This classification exempted them from the Ethics Code’s whistleblower protections, which applied to employees only. The anonymous reporting hotline was designed for employees. HR could not process agent complaints. The company’s safety infrastructure was structurally inaccessible to the people who were being harmed.
• Top agents designated as “Influencers” hosted recruitment events and were described by a former broker in the New York Times exposé as operating in an environment where “high earners are granted star status, and allegations of misconduct are ignored.” The same economic status that made Bjorkman and Golden valuable to the revenue-share network made them effectively untouchable within it.
• After three years, sponsors become “Vested Participants,” meaning they earn from their downline permanently, even after leaving the company. This meant that terminating Bjorkman early cost the company money. It chose to honor that financial obligation rather than protect the agents beneath him in his network.
• Board member Monica Weakley, an eXp Realty agent, derived two-thirds of her income from her eXp role. The court found her lack of independence from Sanford legally significant: as CEO, Sanford had the power to terminate her contractor status. The same economic dependency that trapped survivor-agents in their perpetrators’ networks also compromised the independence of the board member who might otherwise have voted to act.

The Cost of a Life Metric

The Settlement Isn’t Justice

The Carter Action, involving a third agent who alleged she was offered money for sex and was inappropriately touched, settled on undisclosed terms. The first two anti-trafficking suits remain in active federal litigation as of the court record date. No financial penalty has been assessed against eXp for the conduct documented in this case.

• The Carter v. Chris Nevada settlement terms are not public, meaning there is no way to assess whether the amount corresponded to the documented harm or whether it included any admission of wrongdoing.
• The company continues to pay Bjorkman under the revenue-share agreement and continues to pay Golden under a revenue-share agreement, despite both men having been the subject of federal anti-trafficking allegations. These ongoing payments are a direct product of the Accelerated Compensation Agreement and vesting mechanics that the board approved or allowed to proceed.
• The Delaware derivative action, if it proceeds, would recover for harm to the corporation, meaning any recovery would go to eXp as a company rather than to individual survivors. The federal anti-trafficking suits are the primary vehicle through which survivors seek direct accountability.
• No board member has been removed as a result of the conduct documented in this case. Sanford remains CEO. The company’s pyramid-style revenue-share compensation model, which the court identified as the structural incentive for the cover-up, remains in operation.

This Is the System Working as Intended

The eXp case is not an anomaly. It is a demonstration of exactly how corporate structure, compensation design, and legal classification choices interact to produce predictable outcomes when powerful people have financial reasons to suppress harm.

• eXp’s decision to classify agents as independent contractors rather than employees was not incidental. It was structural. It meant the company’s whistleblower protections, HR processes, and anonymous reporting systems legally did not have to apply to the very people being harmed. The classification that saved the company money on benefits and labor law compliance was the same classification that left survivors with no internal recourse.
• The revenue-share model that made eXp profitable created a mathematical relationship between the perpetrators’ continued employment and the income of every person above them in the downline, including the CEO, the board chair, and multiple directors. The court found this relationship directly plausible as the motive for the cover-up. The system that generated the company’s growth generated the incentive to protect the people destroying it.
• The sponsor-lock provision in the Independent Contractor Agreement, which was added or strengthened between 2018 and 2020 to prevent agents from switching sponsors, was cited by the Compliance Committee as the explicit contractual basis for denying Agent Five’s request to separate from Bjorkman’s financial network. A policy designed to stabilize the revenue-share program was used as a legal mechanism to trap survivors.
• The board’s governance structure concentrated power in ways that made accountability difficult by design. Sanford alone comprised the Equity Committee, which controlled stock grants. The Control Group held 45.5% of shares. The same voting structure that gave the company stability in capital markets gave the CEO and his allies the ability to control board composition, including the decision not to renominate the Whistleblower.
• Delaware corporate law’s demand requirement, which requires shareholders to ask the board to sue itself before filing a derivative action, allowed the company to argue for more than a year that the board should be given a chance to decide whether to pursue claims against itself. The court ultimately found that demand was futile, but only after extended litigation. The procedural design of corporate accountability is built to protect insiders from expedited accountability.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

The following recommendations are editorial analysis based on the documented failure modes of this case. They are not findings of the source document.

The core structural failure this case exposes is that eXp’s compensation design created a direct financial incentive for leadership to protect high-earning agents regardless of their conduct, while the company’s contractor classification stripped the people most at risk of the safety infrastructure they were owed.

Regulatory Track

• The Securities and Exchange Commission should require companies with multi-level compensation structures, where executive pay is directly tied to the retention of subordinate workers, to disclose that incentive structure as a material governance risk in annual filings. Investors in eXp were not told that the CEO’s bonus was calculated on the performance of specific named individuals in a recruitment downline.
• State real estate licensing boards in every state where eXp operates should require that anti-harassment and assault reporting systems explicitly cover independent contractor agents, not just employees, as a condition of maintaining a broker license. The regulatory gap that allowed eXp to exclude agents from its whistleblower infrastructure was not a legal accident. It was a licensing gap that regulators have the authority to close.
• Labor regulators at the state and federal level should audit the classification of eXp agents as independent contractors. The Independent Contractor Agreement restricted agents from switching sponsors, locked them into financial networks controlled by their sponsors, and subjected them to company codes of conduct. Workers who are contractually restricted in this way and economically dependent on company-controlled networks are not meaningfully independent.

Legislative Track

• Legislation at the state level should require that any company operating a multi-level compensation or recruitment model extend its internal complaint and safety infrastructure, including whistleblower protections and harassment reporting systems, to all workers who generate revenue for the company, regardless of employment classification. The harm in this case was enabled by the gap between policy coverage and the people actually at risk.
• Vesting agreements for individuals terminated for cause involving criminal conduct or documented sexual misconduct should not be legally enforceable. The Accelerated Compensation Agreement that paid Bjorkman more than $1 million after termination for “inappropriate behaviors” should not be a permitted use of corporate funds. Legislatures should clarify that corporate fiduciaries who approve such agreements in the face of documented misconduct breach their duties as a matter of law.
• Sponsor-lock provisions in independent contractor agreements used in recruitment-based compensation networks should be subject to a statutory safety exception: any worker who reports sexual assault, harassment, or drugging by a sponsor should have an immediate legal right to a sponsor change, regardless of contractual terms. The current regime allowed a contract clause to function as a cage.

Corporate Governance Track

• eXp should be required by any settlement or court order to implement an independent board majority with no revenue-share participation, past or present, and no financial dependency on the company beyond director compensation. The Weakley situation, in which a director derived two-thirds of her income from her contractor role and the CEO had the power to terminate it, is a structural conflict that governance rules should prohibit.
• The Equity Committee, which at the time of the misconduct consisted solely of CEO Sanford, should be reconstituted as a fully independent committee. No officer who participates in the revenue-share program should serve on any committee with authority over compensation or equity grants for agents in their own downline.
• The company’s revenue-share program should be amended to prohibit any individual from earning revenue-share income from an agent who has filed a formal complaint of sexual assault or harassment against that individual or any person in that individual’s upline. The current design means that forcing a survivor to remain in a perpetrator’s downline was, from the company’s perspective, the financially correct outcome.

What Now?

This case is still in motion. The derivative action in Delaware survived the motion to dismiss and is proceeding against CEO and Board Chair Glenn Sanford, Board members Randall Miles, Dan Cahir, Jason Gesing, and Eugene Frederick, and Chief Legal Counsel James Bramble. The federal anti-trafficking suits in California remain active. The survivors have not stopped.

The Watchlist: entities with authority over this company and this conduct:

• Securities and Exchange Commission: eXp World Holdings trades on NASDAQ under ticker EXPI. The SEC has jurisdiction over material disclosures. The question of whether the board’s knowledge of serial rape at company events, and its financial incentives to suppress that knowledge, constituted a material undisclosed governance risk is a question the SEC has the authority to ask.
• U.S. Department of Justice / FBI: Federal anti-trafficking laws are at the center of the California suits. The DOJ and FBI have independent jurisdiction to investigate trafficking-related conduct. The civil suits do not exhaust criminal jurisdiction.
• State real estate licensing boards: Every state where eXp Realty operates as a licensed broker has the authority to condition or revoke that license based on demonstrated failures of broker oversight. The conduct documented in this case took place at company-organized events under a company broker network.
• NASDAQ: As a listed exchange, NASDAQ has its own governance standards for listed companies, including requirements around board independence. The court found that eXp’s own filings classified board member Weakley as non-independent under NASDAQ rules while she was making decisions about this case.
• Delaware Court of Chancery: The derivative action is active. The court has already found the claims reasonably conceivable. Follow the docket at C.A. No. 2024-0998-KSJM.

If you are a current or former eXp agent with relevant knowledge, the plaintiff’s counsel in the derivative action is Bernstein Litowitz Berger and Grossmann LLP and Labaton Keller Sucharow LLP. The federal anti-trafficking plaintiffs are represented separately in California federal court. RAINN (1-800-656-4673) provides confidential support to survivors of sexual violence and can help connect individuals with legal resources. If you were harmed at an eXp event and have not spoken to an attorney, your window for civil claims may be time-limited by statute of limitations rules. Speak to a lawyer as soon as possible.

If you own eXp stock, contact your fund manager or pension administrator. The plaintiff in the Delaware action is the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System. Other institutional investors have standing to participate in or monitor this litigation. The Building Trades Pension Fund of Western Pennsylvania joined as an additional plaintiff.