Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing "internal scrutiny" at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

The revelations come in an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal detailing a coordinated campaign to discourage the tabloid from publishing the story, pulling resources from both Activision Blizzard and Meta.

Sandberg dated Kotick, now accused of facilitating a culture of sexual harassment and discrimination at his company, from 2016 to 2019. In spite of denying that he had knowledge of disturbing allegations of employee misconduct, including alleged rape, Kotick apparently knew about many of those incidents — a fact he concealed from the company's board.

The Wall Street Journal report details how Sandberg contacted the Daily Mail's digital division in 2016 and again in 2019 as the tabloid was working to reveal a temporary restraining order against Kotick that a former girlfriend put in place in 2014. Sandberg and Kotick reportedly "developed a strategy to persuade the Daily Mail not to report on the restraining order," working in tandem with employees from their respective companies.

In both instances, Sandberg reportedly told the tabloid that Kotick's former girlfriend since retracted the allegations of harassment that prompted her to file for a restraining order.

According to The WSJ report, Meta is now reviewing its COO's involvement in trying to kill the story about her then-boyfriend. When TechCrunch asked if Sandberg would have violated company policy by leveraging internal PR resources for a personal dispute, Meta declined to answer.

"Sheryl Sandberg never threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision," Meta Executive Communications spokesperson Mao-Lin Shen said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. "This story attempts to make connections that don’t exist."