The Washington Post was ordered by an arbitrator to reinstate the opinion columnist whom the paper terminated last year over public comments she made following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa ultimately ruled against the Post and ordered Karen Attiah to be rehired with full back pay and lost benefits.
What she said
The dispute between the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and The Washington Post was ultimately over Attiah’s Kirk-related Bluesky posts she made on the day of Kirk’s death, Sept. 10, 2025, per The New York Post:
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men that espouse hatred and violence.”
In another post, she said, “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.”
The day after, Opinion editor Adam O’Neal texted the paper’s Human Resources officer, “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale — completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions. We need to discuss this urgently,” according to the filing.
The decision was ultimately made by The Post’s CEO at the time, William Lewis.
Management argued that Attiah’s comments targeted people based on race and gender and damaged the Post’s journalistic integrity. The Post also argued that her posts created a safety risk during the volatile aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, and specifically objected to her references to “white men.”
“When there is an intense moment like this, there’s a video circulating of someone dying in a horrific, gruesome way, people should weigh in and people should have a conversation about that,” O’Neal said during a hearing, per the filing. “But this was not attempting to have a constructive conversation or even to make, you know, important points. It was for shock value, very clearly, and it’s not a calm, measured response with that, so that damages our journalistic reputation.”
He emphasized that security concerns were the greatest reason for Attiah’s termination:
The country was at this “intense moment of violence” and that “we didn’t know what was coming next. And we’re walking into a building that says Washington Post on top of it, and here there’s a columnist at Washington Post on this account that’s making these horrific comments and that was of deep security concern beyond the professional — beyond the publication standards and our policies,” he added. “We were worried that there would be some kind of retaliation or an outbreak of violence after the Charlie Kirk assassination.”
Arbitrator sides with defense
The Democracy Defenders Action, a nonprofit co-founded by lawyer Norman Eisen, and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild represented Attiah and argued that the paper barely investigated before firing Attiah, saying that “the penalty of termination is grossly disproportional.”
Miller Espinosa sided with Attiah:
“The record is clear,” she wrote, “for all the reasons previously discussed, that The Washington Post failed to establish the Grievant engaged in gross misconduct. ... The Washington Post did not have good and sufficient cause to terminate the employment of the Grievant, Karen Attiah.”
Attiah made the announcement of her victory on social media, “The Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth after Charlie Kirk’s killing. I fought back.”
In a separate post, she called out others:
“Crickets from the ‘free speech’ and cancel culture crusaders when I was fired for speaking the truth about white men who chose to espouse hatred and violence. Even more crickets now that I won the arbitration case. Funny, innit.”