When the New York Post's digital-editor-in chief Michelle Gotthelf was ousted, not everyone saw her as a victim. angelinachapin reports
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But when she filed a lawsuit a few days later alleging she was axed for telling Poole that she had been sexually harassed by Col Allan, the Post’s former head honcho, the reactions were divided. Depending on whom you ask, Gotthelf was either a strong female leader in a misogynistic shark tank or a perpetuator of a toxic newsroom culture. “The way the Post is run can be really summarized by misogyny and control,” says one former reporter who left in the past few years.
The Post says it does not tolerate bullying or misogyny and that any such accusations do not reflect “current conditions.” A spokesperson noted that the newsroom has been remote for much of the pandemic and pointed to the fact that women are now in charge of multiple departments. With its cheeky headlines and punny ledes, the paper gave every local story the feeling of a sensational scoop. While the newspaper also runs investigative reporting, often written by left-leaning staffers, its editorial view still boils down to good cops and bad robbers.
Well into the aughts, the Post was still running the kind of operation where certain male editors might touch your “boob or butt,” according to Meredith, a former reporter. One lawsuit, filed by a former Postie a decade before Gotthelf’s complaint, alleged that David Boyle, a former photo editor, was known for “bumping” and “grinding” with the 20-something female assistants whom it said he referred to as “David’s Harem” at holiday parties.
But the management world turned out to be a “hostile work environment,” says Gotthelf, where Allan allegedly called women names like “skank,” “stupid,” or “sneaky lesbian” and told her that Murdoch “doesn’t like many women.” She says as his marriage dissolved, Allan turned his vitriol directly on her, asking “Who do you think you are, my wife?” in newsroom debates, an allegation he disputes. She says her male boss at the time shrugged off her complaints with “Not much I can do.
Throughout my reporting, a dozen sources also told me they’d heard about an alleged incident in which a Post editor, Paul McPolin, had propositioned a freelance reporter. When I called Meredith, the reporter in question, she confirmed that at a bar in 2006, McPolin had said he would make her a staffer in exchange for a blowjob. At the time, Meredith says, she declined the apparent offer, brushing it off as a mix of typical industry sexism and hard partying, since everyone was drinking.
One field reporter remembers being yelled at so loudly by a senior colleague over speakerphone in 2020 that her friend, who was driving, pulled off the highway in shock. Some told me they’d been sexually harassed by freelance photographers and felt that the company put no safety measures in place to prevent that kind of power abuse.
Dan Good, an editor on the overnight shift who started at the Post in 2012, once got an email from Gotthelf that has haunted him ever since. When he messaged her about being disappointed to see that a story he’d published online about Jennifer Lopez performing for dictators had been written by another journalist for the paper’s front page, she copied his bosses on a cutting response. “We took nothing from your story because there was NOTHING to take,” she wrote.
Even some of Gotthelf’s critics felt some empathy for how the environment might have shaped her. “As a woman in that place, you had to be absolutely ruthless,” says Meredith. “I didn’t have to deal with the internal politics. I didn’t sit in the middle of all those men.” Given Gotthelf’s powerful role, a few Posties thought she didn’t push back hard enough against these directives. Several sources felt she betrayed her own “golden reporter” on a 2020 story about the Biden family. Gabrielle Fonrouge was “like a younger version of Michelle: fearless, tough, and incredibly ambitious,” according to Nora.
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