Reporter Stephanie Armour claims Journal leadership retaliated against her for seeking disability accommodations.
A former award-winning investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal is suing the paper over allegations that its leadership retaliated against her for seeking disability accommodations and tried to push her out of the company as the outlet carried out massive layoffs.
Stephanie Armour, a ten-year veteran of the Journal, “thought working at the WSJ was her dream job, until a change in leadership turned that dream into a discriminatory nightmare,” says the lawsuit filed Tuesday against the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones.
Armour suffers from anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the suit, and had been granted accommodations to work from home for at least two days per week since her hiring at the paper in 2014. But when Damian Paletta and Janet Adamy took over as D.C. bureau chief and Washington Deputy Coverage Chief, respectively, the pair showed “hostility” toward her disability accommodations, the suit alleges.
After the D.C. bureau’s shake-up under new editor in chief Emma Tucker, Armour, who was a union board member at the time, “heard well-informed word that the WSJ was planning to use trumped up performance issues to target union-protected high-wage employees with high health costs/accommodations for termination, specifically to include Ms. Armour,” the suit claims.
A spokesperson for the Wall Street Journal dismissed the claims made in the lawsuit.
“The complaint is filled with baseless allegations, and the legal claims are entirely without merit. We will vigorously fight this lawsuit,” the spokesperson said in a statement to National Review.
The complaint alleges several other reporters were similarly targeted and pushed out, including “a senior reporter who had taken extended medical leave; a disabled veteran and reporter who had taken paternity leave and whose leave was mentioned in his performance improvement plan; and, a multiple award-winning reporter who had high medical costs due to a heart condition.”
“However, because these employees have seniority, it is difficult to terminate them except for cause. These other layoffs which are ongoing are well documented,” it adds.
As NR previously reported, the most recent cuts took place on May 30, when at least eight staffers in bureaus across the country received invites to an online meeting with a New York editor and a human-resources representative for an “organizational update.” On the call, they were quickly and unceremoniously terminated, a process that some called “callous.”
Those layoffs came less than four months after what is known internally as “Bloody Thursday,” the day in early February when Tucker took a scythe to the Washington, D.C., bureau, slashing the jobs of about 30 newsroom staffers, including chopping jobs from the economics team and eliminating a team focused on Washington’s relations with China.
The lawsuit argues that “the suggestion that a host of senior, Pulitzer and other award-winning journalists — among the best in the world — all stopped performing at the same time is preposterous and is clear evidence of what really is going on here.”
After Armour sought formal accommodation for her disability, Paletta allegedly made “false, fraudulent and defamatory claims,” about her, which he then used as grounds to begin a performance-improvement process — the process by which the WSJ terminates employees for cause — despite Armour having only received outstanding performance reviews during her tenure at the Journal before Paletta’s arrival.
“Paletta then used the performance review process to impose new, unreasonable and discriminatory benchmarks on Ms. Armour, with the obvious intent of using her failure to meet these benchmarks as trumped-up grounds to terminate her from the WSJ,” the suit adds.
Robert Housman, an attorney for Armour, told National Review he and his client are “looking forward to turning the investigative tables on the Wall Street Journal.”
“Discovery in a case like this is a lot like good journalism: You dig hard and deep enough and the facts have a way of coming clear,” he added.
“This lawsuit stands for two simple facts: First, you can’t retaliate against an employee when they seek a reasonable accommodation. Second, you can’t lie about an employee’s performance to construct a false rationale to push them out. It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the Wall Street Journal or anyone else to know these facts. However, these facts seem new to the paper’s new leadership,” he said.
While the alleged discrimination came to a head under WSJ’s new leadership, the suit alleges a “common, repeated pattern” of Armour being professionally punished for her disability.
Upon her hiring at the Journal in 2014, then-D.C. bureau chief Jerry Seib agreed to allow her to work from home twice weekly. Months later, when Armour made a transition from covering banking to covering health care under Adamy, Adamy told Armour she may no longer work from home twice a week after the pair had an “otherwise routine disagreement over a story.”
Armour then pursued, and was granted, a formal ADA accommodation from the Journal to work two days per week.
For years afterwards, Armour was permitted to work from home two days a week, until the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Journal, like many other companies, permitted employees to work fully remote.
When a return-to-office plan was developed in August 2022, Armour’s then-bureau chief granted her request to work at home as often as needed.
“Ms. Armour was told her work performance was strong and that days in the office didn’t matter,” the suit claims, adding that the Journal twice nominated work she had done for the Pulitzer Prize during this time period and also awarded her a performance bonus, all while working fully remotely.
Shortly after Paletta took over in February 2024, however, he ordered Armour to return to the office three days per week. This led Armour to file a formal request for an additional ADA remote-work accommodation, which was granted on April 16.
Less than two weeks after the Journal approved her work-from-home accommodation, Paletta issued Armour a formal performance warning, which is the first step in the WSJ’s termination-for-cause process, according to the lawsuit.
“It was widely known that, once this process was begun, termination was almost always the result,” the suit said.
The warning triggered a 30-day review period. During this time, Armour was given a set of metrics to achieve that were “discriminatory/retaliatory and purposefully unattainable,” according to the lawsuit.
The suit adds that Armour was “one of the WSJ’s most prolific reporters and scoop generators,” prior to Paletta’s takeover. Armour produced four stories in May 2023; Six in April 2023; and, ten in March 2023, including four scoops.
Paletta began Armour’s performance-warning program just two months after he began at the Journal and never once edited a story reported solely by Armour, meaning he had “no basis to make any assessment of Ms. Armour’s performance.”
“His sole supervision of Ms. Armour consisted of efforts to kill her story ideas to ensure her failure — story ideas that as a rule were subsequently reported on by competing publications to much fanfare,” the suit says.
Armour ultimately resigned from the paper on June 17 and accepted a new job at a different media outlet.
“Defendant’s unlawful actions have caused Plaintiff severe financial and emotional injuries,” the suit claims.
“Ms. Armour took great pride in working at the WSJ. She considered it one of the elite publications in journalism. Working at the WSJ was a professional dream of Ms. Armour’s,” it says, adding that she “fully expected to remain at the WSJ until the date of her natural retirement.”
The lawsuit seeks either reinstatement or front pay “to compensate Plaintiff for all future financial loss resulting from the discrimination,” running forward until her natural retirement age, as well as repayment of all salary and other benefits she lost as a result of discrimination; unnamed compensatory and punitive damages; and attorneys fees and expenses.
The lawsuit comes just a month after National Review spoke with eleven current and former newsroom veterans about the state of turmoil at the paper under Tucker and Paletta’s leadership.
Working at the Journal under Tucker has “turned from a dream job to just a slow-rolling nightmare,” said one former staffer. Another called morale at the paper, particularly in the D.C. bureau, “the worst of any workplace I’ve ever been in my career.”