Explosive lawsuit targets lying NY Times

The Gray Lady is getting a very public checkup.

Florida's giant state pension fund and a Washington think tank went to court in Manhattan on Wednesday to force The New York Times Company to open up its boardroom files. Their petition says the paper's directors have done nothing while its newsroom broke its own rules, over and over, on its coverage of Israel.

The 48-page petition, filed Sept. 23 in New York State Supreme Court, leans heavily on a newsroom insider. She is described as a decade-long Times employee who spent years reporting what she saw as anti-Israel bias through every official channel the company has. She says she was brushed off, rerouted and, at one point, told she might be happier somewhere else.

"If you don't like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours," a Times Human Resources representative allegedly told her after she complained about what she called a widespread culture of anti-Israel bias.

WHO'S SUING, AND WHY

The petitioners are the State Board of Administration of Florida, which invests money for the Florida Retirement System (more than 1.2 million members and beneficiaries), and the National Center for Public Policy Research, a nonprofit shareholder that has owned Times stock since 2017. According to the filing, the Florida fund holds 161,375 shares of the company's publicly traded Class A stock.

Their lawyers include Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier's office and the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

Technically, this is not a suit over what the Times printed. It is a "books and records" petition under New York's Business Corporation Law, which lets shareholders inspect a company's internal files for a proper purpose. The petitioners say they want to know one thing: whether the Times board does anything at all to check that the paper follows its own standards.

The petition says the petitioners are not asking the court to "review, second-guess, or override any editorial judgment." But the story the filing tells along the way is brutal.

"THE OMBUDSMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES"

The unnamed whistleblower, according to the petition, worked in the Times newsroom from 2016 to 2026 and built up an extensive file: "dozens of hours of recorded conversations" with supervisors and HR, internal complaints, Slack messages and a 26-slide deck.

Starting in 2019, the petition says, she raised concerns at least 15 times through the channels the Times provides for exactly that purpose: the EthicsPoint hotline, the Standards desk, Employee Relations and Human Resources.

The petition says those channels "turned on her rather than address what she reported."

Among the allegations:

• In November 2023, her desk supervisor, Solana Pyne, allegedly ordered her to route future complaints to Pyne herself, the same supervisor the complaints were about. A deputy on the Standards desk allegedly apologized in writing that she had gotten "in trouble of some kind" for speaking up. According to the petition, "nothing changed."
• At an August 2024 meeting with HR present, Pyne allegedly told her that "it's not your job to be the ombudsman of the New York Times." The petition notes the Times eliminated its real ombudsman-style post, the public editor, back in 2017 and never replaced it. She was also allegedly told that colleagues were "reluctant to work with" her, which she was told had to do with her "point of view."
• HR allegedly asked her to edit or delete an internal Slack message supporting Jewish colleagues. The petition says staffers who publicly advocated for the Palestinian side of the war received no such request, as far as she knows.

THE HITLER "JOKES"

The petition's most explosive section is about Soliman Hijjy, a Gaza-based freelance video journalist.

According to the filing, the Times first hired Hijjy in 2018 and stopped using him in 2022 after social media posts praising Adolf Hitler surfaced. Then, "within days of October 7, 2023," the paper allegedly brought him back. His byline was on Gaza coverage by Oct. 16, 2023, the petition says, and he contributed to 13 war stories, including the Times' first report on the Al-Ahli hospital explosion.

When a media watchdog exposed the rehiring, the Times said Hijjy "has maintained high journalistic standards," according to the petition. His byline then vanished, but the whistleblower claims he kept reporting without credit.

When the whistleblower raised the rehiring, according to the petition, Pyne allegedly explained the posts by pointing to the lack of Holocaust education in Gaza. On the same recording, she allegedly admitted the posts "don't in any way meet our standards," and added: "There have been other cases . . . multiple other cases of reporters at this paper who have violated our standards . . . we will consider them in the context and in some cases we have continued to employ these people."

Another manager allegedly called Hijjy, on tape, "the guy that we hired who posted the pro-Hitler stuff."

In an August 2024 recorded conversation with a third manager, the whistleblower recounted being told that the rehiring had been "vetted . . . up the hierarchy of the New York Times and . . . the top brass were okay with hiring him." She also said she had been told the paper enrolled Hijjy in Holocaust training and told her to keep that quiet.

Her 26-slide deck, presented to Deputy Standards Editor Mike Abrams on Nov. 7, 2023, allegedly recorded that in a private leadership meeting, Hijjy's praise of Hitler was waved off as "just some jokes." The same deck, according to the filing, described the "rejection of a footage source that is pro-Israel," pitches for "several projects on injustices by Israel" and "calls to use 'Genocide.'"

"TERRORISTS" BECOMES "MEN"

The petition goes through a list of alleged editing decisions on the whistleblower's desk after Oct. 7:

• The Ofakim rewrite. In an Oct. 25, 2023 account of the Hamas massacre in the southern Israeli town of Ofakim, staff allegedly changed "terrorists" to "men" twice. The Standards desk had only asked them to scale back repetition, and elsewhere in the same story it suggested "assailants." According to the petition, "men" was "the desk's choice, not Standards'."
• The Hamas health ministry. On Oct. 18, 2023, Standards allegedly told staff to identify Gaza's health ministry as "the health ministry run by Hamas." When a video journalist was told to follow that guidance, colleagues allegedly argued it applied only "going forward," and the piece ran citing "Health officials." A deputy Standards editor allegedly called the exchange "a display of group think on the video desk."
• The Al-Shifa tunnels. Staffers allegedly spent weeks trying to show that tunnels under Gaza's biggest hospital were purely civilian. Even after Israel released footage of weapons in the tunnels, the head of the video department allegedly called them "alleged tunnels" at a morning meeting.

THE STARVING-TODDLER PHOTO

The petition also returns to one of the most disputed images of the war: the July 25, 2025 Times front-page photo of Gaza toddler Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq. The caption said he "was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition."

According to the filing, Getty Images had already distributed photos of the same child two days before the Times published. Getty's caption said he had "pre-existing congenital health issues, including brain complications and muscle atrophy," and quoted a hospital nutrition specialist.

The petition says the Times' internal photo system, as captured by the whistleblower, shows the description field was later changed to add that the child "has a pre-existing health condition," with the note, "NB. updated caption to include pre-existing condition," and a manager's instruction: "Do not publish without explicit ok from a manager." The system does not show when that edit was made.

The Times later added an editors' note saying it learned of the condition "after publication." The petitioners say the photo field's edit history will show whether that is true.

THE TOP BRASS

It names at least ten senior editors and executives who allegedly got or learned of the whistleblower's reports: Monica Drake, Charlotte Behrendt, Susan Wessling, Mike Abrams, Phil Corbett, Joanna Helferich, Carolyn Ryan, Solana Pyne, Patrick Kingsley and Mark Scheffler.

It also points to two sitting board members.

The first is CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. The filing says she was at a December 2023 all-hands meeting where it was reported that complaints about how the paper framed its war coverage had "come up" in meetings with several desks.

The second is Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger. In May 2019, after the Times ran an international-edition cartoon of Israel's prime minister as a guide dog wearing a Star of David collar, a cartoon the paper admitted "included anti-Semitic tropes," Sulzberger promised the whole company in writing: "We are updating our unconscious bias training to ensure it includes a direct focus on anti-Semitism."

According to the petition, that training "was never implemented." The whistleblower says she asked about it five or six times, including in a written question at a December 2023 company meeting. That question was never read aloud. The petition says that more than five years later, no such training has been offered to her or, as far as she knows, to anyone else.

THE PAPER TRAIL

The filing also leans on the public record. It cites a 2024 peer-reviewed study that counted 72 errors the Times admitted in eight months of Israel-Hamas war coverage, 48 of them about Israel, with corrections it called "late, vague and sometimes evasive." It points to the October 2023 Al-Ahli hospital headline blaming an Israeli airstrike, which the Times later admitted "relied too heavily on claims by Hamas."

It cites Nicholas Kristof's May 2026 column, "The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians." Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was quoted in it, publicly said "the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views."

And it cites the August 2026 federal jury verdict in Alabama, which the Times itself called its first defamation loss at trial in more than 50 years. Jurors awarded former University of Alabama basketball player Kai Spears $9.25 million. A judge later cut the award to $4.75 million, but the liability finding stands. According to the petition, a Times standards editor wrote the day after that story ran: "I hope we're right on this."

NO ONE MINDING THE STORE?

The Times tells investors in its SEC filings that "a perception that our journalism is unreliable or biased" could hurt its brand and revenue. Yet, the petitioners say, nothing in the board's structure watches for that risk. The petition says the Audit Committee charter, amended as recently as June 12, 2026, does not mention editorial standards, accuracy, corrections or defamation exposure. Its confidential complaint hotline covers only "accounting, internal accounting controls or auditing matters."

THE TIMES FIRES BACK

The Times has flatly refused to hand over anything, according to the filing.

In an Aug. 21, 2026 letter, the day after the Alabama verdict, the company's lawyers allegedly called the demand "transparently pretextual and made in bad faith," said it "violates the First Amendment," objected that it sought records of "the day-to-day business and editorial judgments of The Times," and called it "coordinated harassment."

The petitioners say they then cut their request down to five categories: board charters, agendas, reporting lines and versions of the paper's ethics handbook. They say they explicitly promised not to seek reporters' notes, unpublished drafts, source information or editorial deliberations. At a Sept. 1 meet-and-confer, they say, the Times' lawyers "remained adamant that no production would be made."

"If no reporting channel exists, the Company may say so and produce nothing," the petition says. "The Company, offered that resolution twice, produced nothing."

The Times' own arguments, including the First Amendment objection and its claim that the demand is a pretext for harassment, will be tested in court. The petition, as posted, carried a clerk's notice that it had not yet been reviewed for acceptance.

The petitioners are asking a judge to order the Times to produce the narrowed documents and to award legal costs and possibly attorneys' fees if the refusal is found to have been in bad faith. They say the inspection could lead to a shareholder derivative suit against the board.

As for the whistleblower's tapes, the petition says the petitioners' lawyers have reviewed them and that they are "available to the Court."