Bezos’ Washington Post Ordered to Rehire Columnist Fired Over Charlie Kirk Posts

The Washington Post has been ordered to rehire a writer who was fired over social media posts she made in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk.

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Sarah Miller Espinosa, a private arbitrator, ruled that the outlet, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, did not have “good and sufficient cause” to fire opinion columnist Karen Attiah and had “violated” its labor agreement, The New York Times reported.

In one post on Bluesky, Attiah wrote that she was “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.”

In another post, Attiah paraphrased a 2023 quote from Kirk made during his podcast on the day of his death, stating: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s spot.”

Attiah was the last Black columnist on The Washington Post’s staff before her dismissal. Her firing also came months after Bezos demanded that the Post’s opinion section focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” in an apparent attempt to appease President Donald Trump after his return to the White House. The newspaper began hemorrhaging subscriptions soon after.

In a September 2025 Substack post, Attiah said the newspaper had “rushed” to fire her without due cause, which was “not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

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Attiah has been fighting the Post for nearly a year, accusing it of violating its labor agreement and social media policy while arguing that her posts were within her purview as an opinion columnist.

“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Espinosa wrote in her decision. Espinosa also ordered the Post to compensate Attiah with back pay dating to her dismissal last September.

In a statement to the Times, 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 added that she is still “willing to go back” to 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 told the Daily Beast that it respects the arbitration process and declined to comment further.

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