Karen Attiah spent over a decade as an opinion columnist at the Washington Post. In September 2025, the paper fired her after she took to social media to celebrate the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. On Saturday, a private arbitrator ordered the Post to give her the job back — with back pay.

The paper that fired her for celebrating political violence now has to cut her a check for the time she spent not working there.

Arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa ruled that the Washington Post "did not have good and sufficient cause" to terminate Attiah and had "violated" the news organization's collective bargaining agreement. The decision is binding. The Post doesn't get to appeal to a friendlier forum.

Attiah was fired for a series of social media posts following Kirk's killing. Among them: "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 also posted commentary describing Kirk as someone who promoted hatred, and wrote that America's violence problem stems from "the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men."

The Post's termination letter had stated that her posts could "harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff." An interesting standard that apparently doesn't survive arbitration.

Attiah announced the ruling on Bluesky. "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," she wrote. She followed up with a statement: "I was doing my job as an opinion journalist, and doing that job is not misconduct."

Her job, apparently, includes publicly mocking a murdered conservative and framing her refusal to feel bad about it as a racial justice position. Noted.

Washington Post Guild Chair Natalie Vineberg backed Attiah's reinstatement. "Journalists can't work at an organization where they must live in fear of being arbitrarily fired for doing their jobs," she said.

The ruling forces the Post into a position where a writer who publicly celebrated an assassination attempt on a conservative figure returns to the opinion page with the paper's money in her pocket and a binding legal precedent protecting her. The Post's own stated concern — that her posts endangered staff safety — was weighed by the arbitrator and found insufficient.

The collective bargaining agreement won. The Post's editorial judgment lost. And Karen Attiah gets to walk back into the newsroom having described a murdered man's assassination as something she shouldn't have to mourn because of his race.

That's not a workplace dispute. That's a newspaper being told what its standards are allowed to be.