Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah is challenging her firing through a wrongful termination claim, enlisting a Soros-funded legal network to take on her former employer. Attiah was dismissed after posting on Bluesky that “white America” was responsible for gun violence following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In a Wednesday Substack post, Attiah revealed she “retained the Democracy Defenders Fund” to “challenge the termination.” The group is led by former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, who founded the organization, and former MSNBC host Katie Phang. In a Sept. 24 letter to the Post, the two argued Attiah’s dismissal amounted to “wrongful termination” and offered to “discuss how to set these wrongs right.” They warned that if the paper refused, they would “pursue all appropriate remedies for her sake, that of media freedom, and of our democracy itself.”
Eisen and Phang also linked Attiah’s case to former President Donald Trump, writing, “The Post’s unlawful action against Ms. Attiah must, moreover, be viewed in the context of the intimidation campaign President Trump and his Administration have waged to silence those who criticize him.”
Democracy Defenders, backed by millions from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, has frequently targeted the Trump administration in lawsuits. Now, its attention has turned to defending Attiah, who rejected a buyout offered after Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a reorientation of the opinion section toward “personal liberties and free markets.” The Post ultimately fired her, citing her “unacceptable” posts.
Attiah, meanwhile, framed her dismissal as “part of a purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media,” closing her announcement with the caption, “Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will carry the light.”
