As the Post’s managing editor, Tracy Grant, explained to the press at the time, Sonmez’s tweet “displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.” Baron emailed Sonmez personally, saying, “Felicia, a real lack of judgment to tweet this. Many staffers were unaware that the Post’s top editors had long believed that Sonmez was undermining its attempts to cover the news objectively and that her tweet about Bryant, which ran against the hagiographic coverage of his life and career, was for them a final straw. The broader newsroom knew few of these details at the time of Baron’s listening tour. As Sonmez told me in a statement through her lawyer, editors at the Post “retraumatized and humiliated me by forcing me to relive my assault at work, over and over, whenever news broke and a colleague would ask why I wasn’t allowed to cover the story.” Though she was discouraged from speaking publicly about her experiences, the ban forced her to talk about her assault constantly in private since she had to regularly explain why she had to step away from assignments. The ban sidelined Sonmez on a wide range of stories, including those involving former presidential candidate Herman Cain and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. According to a lawsuit Sonmez filed in July of this year against Baron and his inner circle, she was told that, by speaking up about her alleged assault, she had acted like an “activist” and had “taken a side on the issue,” which in their view meant her reporting on assault could open the paper up to accusations of bias.
Not long after she was hired in 2018, she was barred from covering stories related to sexual assault.
Before joining the paper’s politics breaking-news team, she had accused a fellow reporter, former Los Angeles Times correspondent Jonathan Kaiman, of assaulting her in Beijing in 2017. Sonmez had been a point of special focus for the Post’s top brass. “Marty sat there, did not say a word, and stared down at the desk the whole time,” one former editor on the national desk told me. Staffers say that leadership seemed cagey and annoyed, refusing to even mention Sonmez by name. Specifically, Baron and his lieutenants were being grilled on their recent decision to suspend the reporter Felicia Sonmez after she tweeted a 2016 Daily Beast story about rape allegations against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death in a tragic helicopter crash. Marty Baron, the revered executive editor credited with reviving the Post after it was nearly washed away by the tsunami of the internet, had launched a listening tour to address the staff’s concerns about the company’s social-media policy.
In February 2020, the leadership of the Washington Post was in the midst of an internal crisis. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock
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