Washington Post ordered to rehire fired columnist

A private arbitrator has ordered the Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired in September over her social media posts about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It also ordered the company to compensate her with back pay.

Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator, said in a written decision Thursday that the Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, according to a copy of the decision shared with the New York Times by Attiah’s lawyers.

“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Espinosa wrote.

In a statement, Attiah said that she hoped the decision “sends a message to journalists and media institutions everywhere that freedom of expression is always worth fighting for.” She said that she was “willing to go back” to her work at the Post, which she called “one of the world’s most storied newspapers.”

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said, adding that she was “relieved to finally have that record set straight”

A spokesperson for the Post said the company respects the arbitration process and declined to comment further.

The decision is the result of a yearlong fight between the Post and Attiah, who last year accused the company of violating its labor agreement and social media policy when it fired her for posts she said were within her purview as an opinion columnist. A clause in the agreement allows employees to submit disputes for arbitration.

Arbitration is generally considered binding in most disputes, though courts have occasionally overturned decisions after courtroom findings of fraud or other improprieties. The Post’s labor agreement says arbitration is binding, though both the company and the employee retain their legal rights.

The Washington Post said in its termination letter that Attiah’s posts about Kirk had harmed “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect.

Attiah’s remarks about Kirk’s assassination, which she posted to the social network Bluesky on Sept. 10, the day he was shot, responded to the outpouring of grief after the shooting. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” Attiah wrote in one of the posts.

The Post’s opinion section has been in flux since early last year, when Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, moved to reorient the section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Some readers canceled their subscriptions and accused Bezos of attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration.

Lawyers for the Washington Post and Attiah made their arguments before Espinosa in June during a hearing that included testimony from Attiah; Adam O’Neal, then the opinion editor at the Washington Post; and Wayne Connell, the company’s chief human resources officer. Attiah was represented by Democracy Defenders Action, a progressive nonprofit co-founded by the lawyer Norman Eisen, and by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.

In his testimony, O’Neal said he saw Attiah’s posts the morning after Kirk died and sent them to Connell, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by the New York Times. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” O’Neal wrote, according to the transcript.

Soon after, O’Neal and Connell met with Will Lewis, then the CEO of the Washington Post, to discuss the posts, according to the transcript. They ultimately decided to fire Attiah.

During her testimony, Attiah defended her social media posts, saying that they were part of her work for the Post, “commenting on our discourse on political violence,” Attiah said, according to the transcript.

In a statement, Eisen called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.