Karen Attiah claims she’s being ‘canceled’, sources say she’s just blaming her problems on others

A Washington Post columnist who was fired  after misquoting slain free speech activist Charlie Kirk and is now preparing to take legal action— screaming she’s a casualty of censorship and discrimination.

However, an investigation by The Post found Karen Attiah has a history of trying to blame others for her poor work.

Attiah repeatedly misled her audience over the reason her much-hyped debut book had been shelved. She also embellished the nature of her relationship with murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the subject of that book.

At the time of her firing Attiah also appeared to be in violation of her newspaper contract when she began regularly publishing her work on Substack, a competing website.

In 2023 Attiah spectacularly announced that her long-awaited book, “Say Your Word, Then Leave,” about slain WaPo writer Jamal Kashoggi had been suddenly and mysteriously shelved by her publisher, HarperCollins.

“After nearly four years of writing the book, meeting every deadline, my (now former) publisher inexplicably stopped the editing process, forcing me to pull the book. It has been an agonizing setback,” she wrote on X.

“I’ve been told to keep quiet to protect institutions and to protect myself […] People fighting to live a decent life without fear of being crushed by the rich and powerful deserve better.”

Sources with knowledge of the book told The Post that’s simply not true. They claim Attiah struggled for years to produce a publishable manuscript and couldn’t pull it off, and the agreement was canceled by her, not HarperCollins.

Since Khashoggi was murdered in a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey in 2018, Attiah has held herself out as his enterprising editor and close confidant, even claiming multiple times that she “discovered” him.

“That’s bull—t,” said a colleague of Khashoggi’s who knew the Saudi national since 2009. “She did not hire him nor did she discover him. He was quite famous in the Middle East for his writing.”

The source explained how Khashoggi already had a name for himself by the time he came to write for the Washington Post. But it wasn’t just the book publisher who was out to get Attiah.

“I have been canceled by Columbia. I have now been canceled by the Washington Post,” she wrote on Substack following her recent departure — using a line about Columbia University she’s maintained since last Spring, when the school pulled a course she was scheduled to teach called “Race and Journalism.”

That course was among 11 others canceled in early 2025, due to low enrollment, the University explained in an email to students.

According to a Columbia student newspaper, the contracts of adjunct professors stipulate minimum enrollment requirements. Attiah called the move “cruel” and said she was “concerned about the marginalizing of non-western perspectives” at the school.

Immediately following Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination by a lunatic left-winger, Attiah wrote on social media she refused “to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man,” falsely claiming Kirk “espoused violence.”  

She then misquoted him, writing on social media site BlueSky Kirk had said, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

In fact, Kirk said nothing of the sort. He never made his statement about all black women, but four specific people in particular — Michelle Obama, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, canned MSNBC yapper Joy Reid, and the late Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson.

In sacking Attiah on September 15, Washington Post cited violations of its social media policy, claiming her posts “harmed the integrity” of the organization and “endangered” colleagues.

A review by The Post of the newspaper’s recent union-negotiated employee contract reveals writers are forbidden from providing their services to competition.

Attiah had by that time independently started publishing on Substack. Appearing on New York Times writer Paul Krugman’s podcast, he asked if the Washington Post were OK with that.

Attiah dodged the question, responding: “I was like, well, ‘Could I at least do podcasts or something? Can I express myself this way?’ Substack has become a really interesting character in this saga of mainstream media, I suppose.”

Neither Attiah, her lawyer, the Washington Post, nor HarperCollins responded to The Post’s requests for comment.

Attiah also caused Washington Post to come under fire in 2023 when, following the slaughter of 1,500 Israeli civilians by terrorists at a music festival on Oct. 7 by Hamas, she shared content on social media including a Tweet which read: “Settlers are not the victims here and never will be.”

Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent.