A fired Netflix studio executive earning $1.1 million a year claims the company terminated him after he revealed medically prescribed ketamine therapy during a workplace "trust exercise", and his lawsuit says the company's own attorney admitted the disclosure played a role.
Kevin Baillie, vice president and head of creative at Eyeline Studios, told colleagues at a January 2026 company retreat that he had undergone ketamine treatment for clinical depression years earlier. Within months, the company launched an investigation, and by April he was out of a job. Now Baillie is suing, seeking a jury trial along with compensatory damages, lost wages, emotional distress damages, and punitive damages.
The retreat took place at Sendero Ranch, a Northern California property owned by Netflix. Baillie's lawsuit describes a structured "Vulnerability-Trust exercise" at the gathering, the kind of corporate bonding session where employees are encouraged to share personal struggles. Baillie, whose mother had died, disclosed that he had sought treatment for clinical depression at a Santa Barbara clinic in October and November 2022, where he received ketamine under medical supervision.
The lawsuit paints a picture of a workplace culture that freely mixed alcohol and casual behavior with professional life, right up until Baillie's medical disclosure crossed an invisible line. Court papers filed in the case describe Eyeline Studios CEO Jeff Shapiro as maintaining a personal bar in his office "from which he served alcohol (to Baille) including after a successful meeting with Netflix's CEO Ted Sarandos." The suit also alleges Shapiro "purchased beer at a corner store and brought it into the vehicle for the group to share" on at least two company outings and hosted multiple parties.
Baillie's own performance reviews, as described in the lawsuit, suggest a relaxed corporate atmosphere. One review advised him to "drop one or two less f-bombs but don't stop entirely." That is not the language of a buttoned-up workplace with zero tolerance for personal disclosures.
Yet when Baillie shared his prescribed ketamine treatment, therapy he received more than three years before the retreat, under a doctor's care, for a recognized medical condition, the company apparently decided he had gone too far.
The retreat produced another incident the company later scrutinized. The New York Post reported that during the same gathering, a colleague asked Baillie to demonstrate a party trick. Court papers state that "his colleague immediately asked for a demonstration, rather than withhold the openness that the session had encouraged, he performed the trick", drinking a Guinness while standing on his head.
Both the ketamine disclosure and the beer stunt apparently fed into the company's subsequent investigation. On March 18, 2026, an investigator raised the ketamine disclosure with Baillie "in a manner suggesting suspicion of recreational drug use," according to the lawsuit. The framing matters: Baillie says the treatment was prescribed and supervised, not recreational. The investigation reportedly also touched on alleged profanity and drinking.
By April, Baillie was fired. And the company did not leave much ambiguity about why. An unnamed company attorney confirmed that "the ketamine therapy issue has factored into the termination."
Baillie is not a minor figure in the entertainment industry. Before joining Eyeline Studios, he worked on the visual effects teams for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Harry Potter" franchises. His salary at Eyeline reached $1.1 million per year. The lawsuit alleges the company denied him up to a year of severance pay when it let him go.
The suit seeks compensatory damages, lost wages, emotional distress damages, and punitive damages, and Baillie has requested a jury trial. The specific legal claims, whether the suit alleges wrongful termination, disability discrimination, or violations of specific employment statutes, are not detailed in available court filings. The court where the case was filed and the docket number have not been publicly identified.
Neither Netflix nor Eyeline Studios has publicly responded to the allegations. Netflix owns the Sendero Ranch property where the retreat was held. Whether Eyeline Studios operates as a wholly owned Netflix subsidiary or as a separate entity with a partnership arrangement remains unclear from the filings.
The case highlights a contradiction that runs through modern corporate culture. Companies spend heavily on retreats designed to build "vulnerability" and "trust" among employees. They hire facilitators, design exercises, and create environments meant to coax personal disclosures out of their workforce. Then, when an employee actually discloses something personal, in this case, a legal medical treatment for depression, the machinery of corporate risk management kicks in and treats the disclosure as a liability.
Baillie's lawsuit draws a sharp contrast between the company's tolerance for its CEO's office bar, beer runs during work outings, and a culture loose enough to coach an executive on his swearing frequency, and its sudden alarm at learning an employee had once, years earlier, received a doctor-supervised treatment for clinical depression.
The investigation's framing tells the story on its own. Baillie says the company treated his prescribed ketamine therapy as though it were recreational drug use. If the lawsuit's account holds up, the company did not just misunderstand the disclosure, it recast it into something it was not and then used the recast version to justify firing him.
Ask your employees to bare their souls at a corporate retreat, and then fire them for what they share. A jury may have something to say about that arrangement.
