An arbitrator ordered the Washington Post to reinstate Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting about “white men who espouse hatred and violence,” referring to Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator, said in a written decision Thursday that The Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, according to a copy of the decision shared with The New York Times by Ms. Attiah’s lawyers.
“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Ms. Espinosa wrote.
In a statement, Ms. 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.”
So now the Washington Post can’t fire employees who deserve to be fired. Check out some of Attiah’s checkered history.
June 2020.
Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attiah called America “a racist and patriarchal society” in response to the threats she says she received over a deleted tweet. In the tweet in question, she declared, “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karens.’ And not calling for revenge.”
In another tweet over the backlash, she wrote: “America is a racist and patriarchal society. We cannot dismantle the full range of oppression in this society without addressing how toxic ideas of white masculinity interplay with the notion of ‘protecting’ their women from Black people.
Global Opnions Editor for WaPo pic.twitter.com/kyIyFeFMXT
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) June 29, 2020
In September 2025, the Washington Post fired her.
Attiah claimed she was silenced in “racial double standards and America’s apathy towards guns.”
In a Substack post, she wrote, “As a columnist, I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction. Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.”
That’s not the whole story. She was fired for altering a Charlie Kirk quote to make him sound bigoted. Attiah shared a Kirk quote that was clipped to leave out the context.
She wrote, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
Attiah provided no other explanation and repeated it over and over on BlueSky, an angry leftist website.
In actuality, he was sarcastically blasting affirmative action as a few black women were saying they only got their positions through affirmative action. It definitely was not aimed at all black women.
This is what Charlie Kirk actually said:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously
Washington Post wanted to improve the paper, and they couldn’t do it with her on staff. And when she lied about Charlie Kirk immediately after his brutal murder, they took the opportunity to fire her.
Now they might never get rid of her.