kadudu

Edit: Title should say "How would YOU let go of an employee in our situation...?"

Our programmer has been with us for three months now and has just about reached the end of his probationary period. He has been editing sample videos from the content we bought for a few weeks now and up until now had no problem with it. Suddenly he sends an e-mail saying that he can no longer edit our 'disgusting' movies (disgusting meaning it shows penis and vagina :/) and that he will only work 5 hours a day to edit little bits at a time until it is finished because watching all that sex makes him feel sick - the guy grew up in Japan and apparently is more comfortable with the mosaic censorship. After our manager responded that that was his job and he was going to edit the videos during full work hours, our programmer got up and yelled at him and said that he couldn't make him do that. He then proceeded to say that he never knew that our company was adult content oriented when he was hired and that nobody ever told him and that he has proof of it, threatening to sue us. This of course is a lie, as he was told right from the interview process what the programming job entails and what content we work with, and that it was primarily going to be uncensored content.

So my question is not whether or not to fire the guy - he is getting fired for sure. The question is when and how. We're still starting up our websites and so far he is our only programmer. If we let him go now without another programmer lined up then the business will be stalled for who knows how long until we find another one to take his place. Plus, he could decide to retaliate and delete the database, search engine, and all the stuff he made for the sites already, then all our progress is lost. However, if we wait to get another programmer ready to take his place before we fire the guy, there's no telling what sort of damage he can do to us within that time frame. He has already threatened to sue the company. We paid for his flight from Michigan to Southern California after we accepted him for the job. Could we just fire him based on his conduct without getting in trouble? I'm wondering if he can possibly sue for that by saying we made him move away from his home state and then just fired him out of nowhere leaving him with nothing and nowhere to go.

We already told this guy that he is welcome to search for another job but he says he wants to stay with us, it's really strange.

We're going to speak to a lawyer about our options so we're not basing our choice of action based on the responses on this thread. Just curious to see what others would do in this scenario and if anyone else has encountered something like this before.

Thanks.