Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah will be getting her job back after she was fired for making incendiary remarks about conservative activist Charlie Kirk after he was assassinated last year.
Attiah filed a grievance in October 2025 against the newspaper with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents employees under a collective bargaining agreement. The case proceeded to arbitration in June 2026.
Washington Post ordered to rehire columnist Karen Attiah who called Charlie Kirk 'white man that espoused violence' https://t.co/aCt8N27VRi pic.twitter.com/fBWc01qaln
— NY Post Business (@nypostbiz) August 24, 2026
Arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa decided that “The Washington Post did not have good and sufficient cause to terminate the employment of the Grievant, Karen Attiah.”
The arbitrator argued that the Post failed to show that Attiah engaged in “gross misconduct.”
From The New Republic:
A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah—who was fired from the paper last September after she criticized gun violence and posted a racist quote from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his death.
“After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post,” Attiah—the Post’s only Black opinion columnist at the time of her firing—wrote Monday on Bluesky. “They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately.”
“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 in another statement.
An independent arbitrator found the Post “violated” its labor agreement and “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The New York Times.
Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah, which followed a school shooting in Colorado, with only one of her posts actually mentioning Kirk by name. ”
“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence,” she wrote first. “Not just accepts, but worships violence.”
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she then wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career trying to justify racism and bigotry. “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 said later.”
NEWS: The Washington Post has been ordered to rehire columnist Karen Attiah after firing her over social media posts she made following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
— The USA Startup (@theusastartup) August 24, 2026
Among the posts at issue, Attiah wrote that “refusing to tear my clothes pic.twitter.com/pGLfrfG0hT
Espinosa further stated that Attiah’s posts referred only to a limited group of people and not all white men. She said the columnist’s comments did not constitute disparagement based on race and gender. The arbitrator further pointed out that the newspaper’s abrupt decision to fire Attiah without prior discipline or investigation violated the labor agreement.
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