Meta’s formidable public relations apparatus whirred to life this week, as details of a salacious new tell-all memoir about the company and its top executives hit shelves Tuesday.

The book, Careless People, was authored by Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. In it, she accuses the company’s chief of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, then a vice president for global public policy, of sexual harassment; describes the company’s leadership as being “deeply and blindly unconcerned” with Facebook’s impact on human rights; and alleges she was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about Kaplan. Top executives are depicted, at turns, as bumbling, callous, or outright creepy as Wynn-Williams recalls them fumbling their way through meetings with heads of state or negotiating sleeping arrangements on intercontinental flights.

Meta has, unsurprisingly, come out swinging—hard. “We’ve taken immediate legal action due to the false and defamatory nature of the allegations,” a Meta spokesperson told Vanity Fair, noting that the company sent a demand letter to the book’s publisher, Flatiron Books, last week.

Earlier this week, a spokesperson dismissed the book in a statement to Vanity Fair as a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.” The spokesperson cast Wynn-Williams as a “disgruntled activis[t] trying to sell books,” who was fired from Facebook “for poor performance and toxic behavior.” The company said Meta conducted a 42-day investigation into Wynn-Williams’s allegations about Kaplan, including 17 witness interviews, and determined she made “misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.” Kaplan was cleared in that investigation in 2017, according to NBC News.

But the pushback didn’t stop there. Meta also circulated a slew of current and former employees’ social media posts, some of which testified to Kaplan’s character, and all of which described the book as disconnected from their own experiences. “I have never observed him be anything other than professional, thoughtful, strategic and fair,” read one comment, referring to Kaplan. Meanwhile, on its corporate site, Meta published a point-by-point memo describing Wynn-Williams’s claims as “old news.” All of that was after the company sought to enforce a nondisparagement agreement with Wynn-Williams through arbitration, according to letters viewed by Vanity Fair and previously reported by NBC News. Flatiron Books did not respond to a request for comment about the nondisparagement agreement.

This response was predictable. Over the years, Meta has honed its playbook for answering whistleblowers, and its approach to Careless People’s release is ripped from those pages. In 2018, when a political consultant named Christopher Wylie accused Cambridge Analytica of exploiting the private Facebook data of unwitting users to help Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, Facebook preempted the story with its own blog post, accusing Wylie and others of misappropriating data and suspending them from the platform.

Three years later, when former employee Frances Haugen shared reams of internal documents and research with The Wall Street Journal for its Facebook Files investigative series, Facebook similarly sought to discredit the Journal’s reports by releasing its own annotated versions of the research. When Haugen testified before Congress, Facebook’s director of policy communications described Haugen as someone who “never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives,” high shade in the lingua franca of Silicon Valley.

This time around, Meta is taking a similar approach, but tackling a trickier target. Unlike the Facebook Files, Careless People is a memoir, not a journalistic account studded with citations. Flatiron Books itself described the book in a statement as “a first person narrative account of what the author herself witnessed.” The book is chock-full of recreated dialogue from over a decade ago, including when Mark Zuckerberg allegedly praised Andrew Jackson as the greatest president because he “got stuff done.” It also features private moments only Wynn-Williams and the people she’s writing about less than favorably would have been privy to, as when Kaplan allegedly asked her over video conference where she was “bleeding from” after she’d suffered an amniotic fluid embolism while giving birth. That makes her account tougher for either side to prove or dispute. (Meta did not make Kaplan available for comment and declined to comment on this specific allegation.)

Some of Wynn-Williams’s damning accusations are backed up by emails, but many are not, and they’re interspersed with other surreal scenes from Wynn-Williams’s life. At one point, she describes being bitten by a shark as a teenager, and when doctors informed her parents that their daughter might die, Wynn-Williams says her mother wailed, “Just like the cat!” (Their pet Winkels, she writes, had recently died too.)

Should the author’s memories be taken with a grain—or truckload, Meta might argue—of salt? Perhaps. Both a Meta spokesperson and some of the people mentioned repeatedly throughout the book have said they were never contacted for a fact-check. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Macmillan Publishers, which owns Flatiron Books, said the book was “backed up by extensive support documentation” and that it had “absolutely no obligation to provide Meta with a preview and the chance to prevent the world from hearing her story.” Macmillan did not directly respond to Vanity Fair’s question as to whether the book had been fact-checked.

“Meta’s complaint is not that ‘facts’ were not ‘checked,’ it is that they were not given an advance opportunity to shut down publication,” Macmillan’s statement read. “We believe that this is a book that the world should read and we stand fully behind it.”

Either way, the guiding message behind the book—that Facebook’s executives pursued relentless growth, often at the sake of safety and protecting users—is hardly a new one more than 20 years, several books, and numerous congressional investigations later. Zuckerberg himself has apologized ad nauseam for many of Meta’s mistakes. The difference now is that Careless People is coming out at a time when Meta seems least receptive to this kind of moralizing. Nowadays, Zuckerberg says his biggest mistake along the way was apologizing for so much in the first place.