Meet “the Inspector General” of the New York Times Newsroom

“Charlotte is a consummate professional who conducts inquiries with rigor, but also with fairness and integrity,” Rhoades Ha said in a statement. “These inevitably involve uncomfortable situations. People who have been involved in internal investigations may not agree with all aspects of the process. Charlotte’s role is to gather and establish facts; she does not determine the results of her inquiries, including what if any disciplinary action might be taken.”

Behrendt, who declined to be interviewed for this story, came to the Times in 2000 after working as a labor and employment lawyer at Proskauer Rose, the law firm that has for years been the Times’ go-to counsel for labor relations. She quickly moved from the Times’ labor relations team—where she began handling newsroom investigations—into the newsroom, working on various employment-related issues, including contract negotiations with the Guild; over the next decade, her role expanded to include advising masthead editors and managers throughout the newsroom on personnel matters and drawing up newsroom contracts and policies.

She currently functions somewhere between an HR and general counsel role, but, while she works closely with both departments, she reports to neither; she instead rolls up under the paper’s Culture and Careers department, which Drake oversees. The department was created in 2021 to help staff develop their careers and improve the culture of the newsroom, following an internal report that found the Times to be a “difficult environment” for some staffers. “Charlotte’s role existed before the team was created, but we felt it important to situate it in a group that helps reinforce a healthy workplace culture,” Drake said.

Former Times staffers who worked with Behrendt in various capacities generally remember her as smart, discreet, and tough. But she could be harsh, according to one former Times editor. Behrendt’s advice was often “to go for pretty big discipline,” they said. “She was Miss Chop-Their-Heads-Off. And I thought that was too draconian a lot of the time.”

She could also be a helpful resource. “It was never clear whom to turn to for internal complaints, so people would go to Charlotte and say, I’m having trouble with my managers, etc.,” said the Times alum. “She wasn’t originally just a disciplinarian. She worked with grown-ups on the masthead like Bill Schmidt, John Geddes, and Janet Elder who had the power to stop assholes and manage conflict,” the alum added. “As the Times got a lot bigger and labor-management tensions grew, Charlotte’s role changed from arbitrator and judge to cop and prosecutor.”

“What I dislike about the way corporate discipline is handled at the Times is that it is now possible for HR to convict people on charges that are straight out of the courtrooms of Stalin or Mao,” McNeil told me in an email. “One is accused of ‘violating Times core values.’ But what the hell does that mean? It’s a catch-all that permits punishment for anything the bosses don’t like.”

McNeil, who spent more than four decades at the Times, resigned under pressure in 2021, after The Daily Beast reported that students and their parents had complained about comments McNeil made on the 2019 Peru trip, including the N-word. He apologized in a note to colleagues upon leaving the Times and later published a four-part response to the allegations on Medium, where he acknowledged he had repeated the slur in the context of a conversation with students about racist language, in which he asked if someone had used the word.) “It’s not that I think there should be no one in charge of discipline in the newsroom. It’s the way Charlotte did the job: the secrecy, the mean-spiritedness, the prosecutorial attitude,” McNeil added. “To me, putting a humorless lawyer from a union-busting firm in charge of newsroom discipline—which is to say, in charge of the internal spirit of the place—was a recipe for anger and resentment and a climate of fear.”

“One core value they are constantly punishing people for is: ‘Thou shalt not publicly embarrass The New York Times.’ Almost no one is fired unless their offense is first broadcast on Twitter or the Daily Beast or Vanity Fair or whatever,” McNeil said in his email. “In 2019, after private complaints, I got a letter placed in my file; two years later, after the Daily Beast article, I was ousted on the same charges despite our union contract proviso against double jeopardy.” (“Disciplinary decisions are based on the facts, not on media coverage,” Rhoades Ha said. “Donald was reprimanded in 2019 and his eventual departure involved more than one issue.”)

Today the Times newsroom is a different place than it was 10 years ago. It is larger than ever and harder to manage, with no shortage of avenues—social media, Slack, various open letters—for increasingly vocal employees to express concerns and grievances about Times coverage and practices. Management feels they have to provide more guidance across the board and take concerted moves to protect the institution. Behrendt’s evolved role seems to be one such mechanism. As one former senior editor put it, “The fact that she has internal investigations in her title is a character change of astonishing order.”