Search form

Scroll To Top
News & Opinion

Gawker Staff Quits After Boss Misgenders Potential Hires and More

Gawker writers quit over Carson Griffith's transphobic, racist behavior.

Joking about poor people, finding it difficult to hire writers of color…woof!

Well, that's over.

Literally a week after the nonconsensual Gawker reboot announced its first four hires, two of those hires have quit.

Writers Maya Kosoff and Anna Breslaw announced their decision to leave in a statement to The Daily Beastafter just a few weeks on staff, citing a bunch of racist, transphobic, and otherwise garbalesque things that newly appointed editorial director Carson Griffith had said in the short time she'd been their boss.

"We're disappointed it ended this way, but we can't continue to work under someone who is antithetical to our sensibility and journalistic ethics, or for an employer [Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg] who refuses to listen to the women who work for him when it's inconvenient," Kosoff and Breslaw said in the statement.

Among their list of grievances, Kosoff and Breslaw say that:

* Griffith apparently bragged about getting her staff out of some company-wide training sessions on diversity in the workplace. Neither Kosoff nor Breslaw had asked Griffith to do so, and, according to The Daily Beast, they both ended up attending the sessions anyway.

* They said that after Kosoff met with a potential new hire, a nonbinary person of color who uses they/them pronouns, Griffith asked "lol is [name redacted] a girl?" over Slack.

* They cited Griffith saying it would be hard to hire writers of color because she thinks writers of color are only good at writing about race.

* During Breslaw's interview, she recalls Griffith pulled a snack out of her pocket. "That's so poor person of me," Griffith joked.

* Griffith forwarded Kosoff and Breslaw an email chain they'd never asked to see that featured friends of Griffith's talking about rando businessmen's dick sizes.

* Can't forget about those fucked up tweets Splinterunearthed last week where Griffith calls people homos and trannies amidst "joke" after racist "joke."

"We take all claims seriously and will continue to review," a Gawker spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

Kosoff and Breslaw say they met with human resources about their issues with working for Griffith. Despite their expressed discomfort with Griffith's continued pattern of behavior, Bustle Digital Group -- a union-busting media empire run by a guy who once used a woman as a desk in a photo spread promoting his new site for women -- declined to remove Griffith from her position as editorial director of the site.

"We really didn't want any of this to go this way," Kosoff tweeted after The Daily Beast broke the news

Advocate Channel - The Pride StoreOut / Advocate Magazine - Fellow Travelers & Jamie Lee Curtis

From our Sponsors

Most Popular

Latest Stories

Harron Walker