In the frenzied, finger-pointing days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, institutions across the country rushed to appease online mobs and vitriolic politicians who demanded takedowns of anyone critical of the right-wing influencer.
In the year since, courts and arbitrators have forced a growing number of institutions to answer to something much more enduring than right-wing pressure: the law.
The latest is the Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.
The decision from an independent arbitrator is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process.
“I started squealing,” Attiah said in an interview, recalling her union representative calling with the news of her win. “My first thought was like, when is the party?”
Post management fired Attiah on September 11, one day after she posted a series of comments on Bluesky about the public’s response to the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination in Utah earlier that day.
“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 wrote in one post. “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,” another read.
The Post argued Attiah’s comments had “harmed the paper’s reputation and integrity” and “created safety risks” for its staff. It also accused her of violating its social media policy by disparaging white men — a claim the arbitrator said was “unsupported” and “unpersuasive.”
“The Post, this world-renowned newspaper that’s known for standing up to presidents, authoritarians, and speaking truth to power, was saying, ‘well, we got scared,’” Attiah said.
Firing Attiah, an 11-year veteran of the paper, was an “absolutely disproportional” penalty, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa wrote in her decision, which the Washington-Baltimore News Guild shared with Mother Jones.
Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, and in particular since Donald Trump’s return to office, the Post’s opinion section has lurched rightward. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the section would shift its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” Two months before Attiah was fired, opinion editor Adam O’Neill told Attiah during a meeting that he didn’t think her body of work was consistent with that vision.
Her firing ignited concerns about a chilling effect on the press and outrage toward the Post’s leadership. “She was paid, and she was trained, and she was hired to express opinions,” said Amos Laor, general counsel at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, who represented Attiah in the arbitration process. “Obviously, not everyone will agree with a columnist on every issue, but her role is to create lively debate on issues of public concern.”
The Post respects the arbitration process, a spokesperson for the newspaper wrote in an email, but declined to comment further. Attiah says she’s open to returning to her role on the Opinion desk but hasn’t heard from the paper.
“The Post has created quite an awkward situation for themselves,” she said.
Her case adds to a growing number of firings in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that have proven legally unsound.
“The Charlie Kirk situation caused … institutions to completely have this meltdown of cowardice, fear, temporary insanity,” Attiah said. “Now, they’re facing the year-long Charlie Kirk hangover from their moment of drunkenness — the hangover of having to pay people, of having to reinstate people, of having the negative publicity.”
In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, “we saw a coordinated effort to chill any speech critical of his legacy,” Viktoya Vilk, senior director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, wrote in a statement to Mother Jones. More than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for their social media posts about Kirk after his death last fall, according to Reuters.
In the year since, dozens have challenged their firings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has tracked 28 lawsuits filed in federal court by public employees who were terminated over their Kirk-related posts. Fifteen cases are active, and 13 have been settled, six of those for at least six figures, according to FIRE.
- Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, was reinstated and awarded a $500,000 settlement from the university in January. Austin Peay State’s president also apologized to Michael, who was terminated after he reshared a 2023 article that quoted Kirk saying, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
- An administrative hearing judge ruled Mariah Roller, a Florida public middle school teacher, should be reinstated and receive back pay in August. Roller was suspended after posting criticism of Kirk’s support of the Second Amendment and writing “Bye Charlie,” with a waving emoji and fire emojis.
- Maria Ruhtenberg, a public defender in Iowa, returned to work in November 2025 after appealing her termination and received $125,000 in damages. Ruhtenberg had posted on her private Facebook account “you reap what you sow” and “live by the sword, die by the sword” after Kirk’s death.
Several other employees at public institutions received payouts from their employer, though they didn’t return to work. The University of Tennessee agreed to pay an assistant professor $1.9 million earlier this summer. It had fired the professor, Tamar Shirinian, after she commented on a friend’s Facebook that the “world is better off without [Kirk] in it.” An administrator at Ball State University in Indiana received a $225,000 payout in May. In total, colleges have paid nearly $3 million to employees they fired for their comments about Kirk.
As a private employee, Attiah’s case relied not on the First Amendment but on her contract as a member of the Post’s union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose collective bargaining agreement requires “good and sufficient cause for termination.”
“We don’t have robust speech protections for non-public employees. Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection,” said Matthew W. Finkin, a research professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Only six percent of private-sector workers are unionized, Finkin added.
Still, Attiah sees a common thread between her case and the increasing number of settlements at public institutions.
“Collective hysteria and fear infected so many of the institutions that were supposed to be better than this,” Attiah said of the wave of firings. “[They were] supposed to rise above impulse, supposed to rise above making massive decisions based off of fear and emotion.”