Rockstar Counsel Calls Discord Email Post Egregious Gross Misconduct

On Monday 14 September, in a hearing room at the Glasgow Tribunals Centre, Rockstar Games put its case to a former employee under cross-examination. This is the first courtroom evidence this desk has carried in the Rockstar union case, and we are saying so plainly, because everything we have published before now came from listings, union statements and company statements rather than from a room with a reporter in it. Counsel for Rockstar put it to the witness that posting the full text of internal management emails into a Discord server of roughly 350 members was, verbatim, "an egregious act of gross misconduct". What was put to Dayne Oram on day three REPORTED. The account below comes from Press Association Scotland copy by Nick Forbes, who had a reporter in court, carried by Irish News and published at 2026-09-14T17:09:32Z with a modification stamp of 17:10:58Z. The page was retrieved at 2026-09-16T03:04 UTC. Nobody on this desk has seen a transcript or a judgment. Your breach of this policy was an egregious act of gross misconduct. That was Rockstar's counsel, Thomas Cordrey, to the dismissed employee Dayne Oram, referred to in court as Mx Oram. Cordrey also put it to the witness that managers would have "gone ballistic" had they been told in advance that the emails were going to be shared. Judge Lucy Wiseman is presiding. The emails at issue came from Rockstar's vice president of HR, Rob Spampinato, and concerned guidelines for the use of Slack channels. Oram's evidence, as reported, was that the emails had gone to all staff, that they were unaware ten of the Discord members no longer worked at Rockstar, and that the channel was private with all members under NDA. Rockstar's standing position, as quoted in the same PA copy and unchanged since its 7 September statement: Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. How long this runs, and where it sits against the release REPORTED. The final hearing opened on 10 September 2026 and runs to 16 October 2026, Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, at 3 Atlantic Quay, 20 York Street, Glasgow, excluding a bank holiday on 28 September. The case number is 4104294/2025. That end date falls a month and three days before Grand Theft Auto VI ships on 19 November. The interval is this desk's own arithmetic from the two dates, and it is 34 days. A company shipping the most-anticipated game in the industry's history will spend the five weeks before it in a Glasgow hearing room answering for how it fired the people who made it. How many people were dismissed, and how many are claimants Three numbers are in circulation. They are not competing versions of one number. The reconciliation offered below is a reading, not a fact, and no source states it. FigureWhat it is said to countWhere it comes from 34Dismissed in October 2025 across the UK and CanadaGame Developer, 11 September; PA, 14 September, as "around 34" 31Workers the IWGB says were unlawfully firedThe IWGB's own hearing notice, 7 September 23Pursuing the unfair dismissal head of claim specificallyPA, 14 September CONFIRMED, by direct fetch of the union's own page. A researcher pulled the IWGB notice raw at 2026-09-16T03:20:40Z, HTTP 200, 38,860 bytes. It says "unlawfully fired 31 workers in October last year". The strings 34, 23 and Canada do not appear on that page at all. So 31 attaches to the union's own account of the firings, and nothing on the union's page attaches it to a claimant count. The sourced construction, and it is Game Developer's, not ours. Game Developer's 11 September reporting sets out 34 dismissed in total, comprising 31 union members and three Canadian non-members, with 23 taking part in the proceedings. Search results read at 2026-09-16T03:21:05Z carry the same construction, along with Rockstar pointing to the three Canadian non-members as part of its own answer to the union-activity claim. That construction fits all three figures, and no source states it as a reconciliation. Read it as the most likely arrangement of the numbers, and print all three with what each is said to count. This desk covered the same problem on 11 September at Four Headcounts, One Case Number, and the position has not changed enough to re-litigate it here. There is also no court record to settle it with. A researcher searched the gov.uk employment tribunal decisions register for Rockstar, Rockstar North and Rockstar Games at 2026-09-16T03:20:10Z, all HTTP 200. The only Rockstar-named result is an unrelated 2017 restaurant case. That is expected, because gov.uk publishes judgments rather than live listings, and it means the headcounts rest on reporting. A live error in wire copy that dates the sackings to 2023 DEBUNKED, and still live at the time of writing. Newsquest's carriage of PA court copy, with an og:article:published_time of 2026-09-11T16:42:14Z and the byline "PA News Agency", states that "some 34 people were dismissed in October 2023". The dismissals were in October 2025. Every other source says so, including PA's own later copy of 14 September, the IWGB, Game Developer, Aftermath and Rockstar's own statement. A researcher retrieved the Newsquest page at 2026-09-16T03:06 UTC and the error was still there, syndicated across the Newsquest network. A reader checking dates against that page would conclude this case is three years old rather than eleven months. The arithmetic at the centre of the blacklisting claim REPORTED, from PA copy of 11 September. Oram's evidence was that a return-to-office petition of spring 2023, with roughly 150 signatures, formed "the basis of a watch list of people to keep an eye on for further activities". Cordrey put to Oram that 141 of the 154 signatories were not dismissed. That number is the core of Rockstar's answer to the blacklisting head of claim, and it is the kind of figure that decides cases. It is also, so far, a proposition put in cross-examination rather than a finding by the tribunal. What is and is not established REPORTED, from PA Scotland copy with a reporter in court: the "egregious act of gross misconduct" line, the "gone ballistic" line, the identity of the judge and counsel, the Spampinato Slack guideline emails, the roughly 350 member Discord, and Oram's evidence about NDAs and the ten departed members. CONFIRMED, primary: the IWGB's own notice says 31 workers and contains no 34, no 23 and no Canada, at 38,860 bytes on 16 September. A READING AND NOT A FACT: that 34 dismissed equals 31 union members plus three Canadian non-members, with 23 taking part. That construction is Game Developer's reporting. No source states it as a reconciliation. DEBUNKED: the October 2023 date in syndicated Newsquest wire copy. The dismissals were October 2025. Explicitly not claimed: anything about the merits. Nothing above is a finding by the tribunal. Cross-examination is a lawyer putting a case, and the judge has not ruled. Method limits: no transcript or judgment was seen by anyone here; no reporting from the Tuesday or Wednesday sittings could be found published anywhere reachable; the gov.uk register holds no Rockstar decision; a law firm page naming the wider Rockstar legal team returns a noindex error page and could not be verified, so only Cordrey's role, which PA corroborates, is stated here. The curtain-raiser for this hearing is at our piece on the tribunal opening on 10 September, and the headcount problem is worked through at Four Headcounts, One Case Number. The claimants' own position on a boycott is at what the fired workers asked players to do. The rest of today's reporting is on the news desk and the standing record is on the GTA 6 wiki.