Rockstar's HR director and the alleged mole in the GTA 6 union Discord

A Rockstar human resources director spent a day of the Glasgow employment tribunal being asked why he had been receiving screenshots of a union Discord server for more than two years, and why dismissals that followed that period of monitoring were presented to the tribunal as urgent. The evidence was heard on 9 October 2026, five weeks into the hearing brought by 31 former Rockstar staff, and it is the first time the case has produced a named witness answering for how the company learned what it knew.

The witness was Charlie Kinloch, co-studio manager and HR director at Rockstar Lincoln. The allegation put to him was that a junior employee — referred to in the hearing under the alias "AB" — had been forwarding him screenshots from a Discord server used for union organising, over a period the claimants put at more than two years.

This is a hearing, not a judgment, and the distinction carries the whole piece. What follows is what was said in a courtroom by people with opposing cases, reported by one outlet. None of it has been found as fact, and the tribunal that will decide has not yet issued anything. The wider case — the 32-player line, the window film, the drones — is set out in our account of what the tribunal has revealed so far.

Where this sits

What was put to him

The claimants' case at this stage of the hearing was not about what was said in the Discord. It was about how Rockstar came to be reading it.

On their account, a junior employee inside the company was a member of a separate Discord server used for organising, and passed screenshots of what happened there to Kinloch over a span of more than two years. Among the material they say reached him was a specific count: that the group was twelve members short of ten per cent of the workforce.

Kinloch's answer was that he never had any interest in, or knowledge of, the union status of the people involved, and that his concern throughout was limiting Rockstar's exposure to leaks. He told the tribunal that membership of the Discord was growing quickly, and that a good many of the new joiners had names the company could not match to anyone it employed.

Both of those can be true of the same screenshots. That is precisely what the tribunal has to resolve, and it is why the figure matters more than it looks.

Why ten per cent is not a round number

Most coverage renders it as the threshold "needed to have a recognised union", which undersells how specific it is.

Under Schedule A1 to the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, a union that cannot get an employer to recognise it voluntarily may apply to the Central Arbitration Committee for statutory recognition. Before the CAC will even accept the application, the union has to clear an admissibility test, and part of that test is that at least 10 per cent of the workers in the proposed bargaining unit are already members. It must also satisfy the CAC that a majority of that unit would be likely to support recognition.

So ten per cent is the floor, not the finish line — the point at which a union stops being a group of colleagues in a chat and becomes a body an employer can be compelled to deal with. A count of how far a group is from that number is a measure of exactly one thing: how close it is to being able to force the question.

None of which establishes that this is why anyone was dismissed. It establishes why the claimants put the number in front of the witness. Rockstar's case is that the trigger was confidential information, not membership arithmetic, and the tribunal has heard both.

The timing problem

The second line of questioning was simpler and, on the face of it, harder.

Rockstar dismissed 34 people across its UK and Canadian studios on 30 October 2025, without notice. Its position has always been that the dismissals were a response to confidential information being shared in what it calls a public forum. Counsel for the dismissed staff put to Kinloch that a company which had been reading the server for something in the order of eighteen months could not simultaneously describe acting as quickly as possible.

Kinloch's answer was that the server's membership had been expanding at an exponential rate, and that the risk changed as it grew. Whether the tribunal reads that as a credible account of a threat that crossed a line, or as a reason offered after the fact, is one of the things its judgment will turn on.

The chronology around that date is already unusually loaded. Six days after the dismissals, Rockstar announced the second delay, moving the game from May to November 2026. No party in this case has connected the two, and nobody should on their behalf.

The witness who will not be called

"AB" is not on the list of witnesses who will be questioned.

Counsel for the claimants asked the tribunal to draw an adverse inference from the absence. The request is a standard one and it is weaker than it sounds: a tribunal may, where a party could have called a witness on a matter in dispute and did not, treat the gap as supporting the other side's version. It is a discretion, not a rule, and tribunals apply it sparingly — there are many ordinary reasons a junior employee is not put in a witness box, including that they are still employed and that the party calling them judges their evidence unnecessary.

What the absence does mean is practical rather than legal: the only account of what "AB" did, and why, comes through other people's documents and other people's evidence. Nobody will get to ask them.

What this does and does not add to the GTA VI record

Nothing about the game. No feature, no date, no mode.

That is worth saying because this case has been a source of game detail before, and the habit has stuck. Rockstar's written defence is where the studio first referred to an online 32-player format, and that remains the only thing the case has produced that bears on what players will eventually load — still unannounced, still unnamed, and set out in full in the online explainer. The October evidence is about surveillance of an organising effort, not about Leonida.

It does add to the picture of how tightly the company holds information, which is the same picture the 2026 leak investigation draws from the other direction: Take-Two pursuing an outside leaker through DMCA subpoenas while, on this account, the company was already watching an internal channel. The IWGB's position throughout has been that nothing sensitive was leaked at all.

What is not confirmed

• That "AB" exists as described, or did what is alleged. It is a claim made in cross-examination by the party opposing Rockstar. The witness denies the purpose attributed to him, and the tribunal has found nothing.
• The two-year span and the twelve-member figure. Both are the claimants' reading of documents the public cannot see. The full evidence bundle is not published.
• That monitoring of this kind would be unlawful even if proved. That is a legal question nobody has answered here. Reading a server is not automatically a detriment on union grounds; the claimants have to tie it to the reason for dismissal.
• The outcome. No judgment. A tribunal may reserve its decision for weeks or months after the hearing ends.
• Whether other Rockstar managers give evidence, and what they say. More witnesses from management were expected when the hearing resumed.
• Any connection to the 2022 leak or to the 2026 one. None has been alleged in this case.

What to watch

The hearing was listed to finish on 16 October. It did not: two further days were added for 17 and 18 November, which puts the end of the case one day before the game goes on sale. Closing submissions are the last thing an employment tribunal hears, and a reserved judgment is the normal outcome in a case of this length; when it comes, it is published in the public employment tribunal decisions database rather than announced by either party.

Until then the record is cross-examination, which is adversarial by design. A question put to a witness is an assertion by the person asking it. That is a different thing from a finding, and this case is going to produce a great many of the first before it produces any of the second.

Sourcing note: rockstargames.com, kotaku.com, pcgamer.com, gamesradar.com, videogameschronicle.com and gamespot.com are all refused by this writer's network, so nothing above was read first-hand. The 9 October evidence — Kinloch's role and name, the "AB" alias, the two-year span, the twelve-member count, the "exponential rate" answer and the adverse-inference request — is reported by Kotaku from the hearing on 9 October 2026, and no other outlet this site sources from has covered that day. It is reproduced here as that reporting rendered it. The 34 dismissals of 30 October 2025, the 31 UK claimants, the 10 September opening and the original 16 October listing are established in earlier reporting across PC Gamer, GamesRadar, VGC and Aftermath. The account of Schedule A1 and the CAC admissibility test is the statute, not reporting, and is included because the ten per cent figure is otherwise unreadable.