The Washington Post has been ordered by a private arbitrator to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah and hand over full back pay to the woman who issued a social media post seemingly mocking the reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk.
Attiah was booted from the paper last September after unleashing a series of jaw-dropping social media posts following Kirk’s assassination. Attiah took to Bluesky to mock the public grief surrounding the killing, writing, “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.”
She also falsely claimed Kirk had stated, “Black women do not have the brain-processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
Journalist Jerry Dunleavy noted that Attiah’s quote was inaccurate as she implied Kirk was referring to all black women when, in reality, he was targeting former first lady Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), former MSNBC host Joy Reid, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Despite Post executives having deemed her remarks “beyond the pale,” “gross misconduct,” and a breach of company standards, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa ruled last week that the paper lacked “good and sufficient cause” to fire her, claiming the outlet violated its labor agreement, The New York Times reported on Monday.
Attiah’s history of radical takes stretches far beyond mocking Kirk. Back in October 2023, on the very day Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 innocent civilians in Israel, Attiah reposted rhetoric justifying terrorism, such as “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.” She also reposted someone who stated, “All my American education taught was that all we have to do to fight brutal, racist oppression is schedule a single die-in or refuse to give up a single seat on a bus and justice automatically prevails through non-violence.”
Meanwhile, she boasted of her radical academic credentials: “I studied race construction, human rights and global anti-colonial resistance in college and grad school. Honey, we did the scholarship way before it was ‘cool.'”
Attiah even looked as if she were justifying raw violence by non-state actors, claiming that public opinion was shifting toward anti-Israel extremism and echoing posts that seemingly accused defenders of Israel of siding with “oppressors, murderers, thieves and political manipulators.”
Attiah celebrated the arbitrator’s ruling, calling the Post “one of the world’s most storied newspapers” and claiming she was “relieved to finally have that record set straight.”
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