The New York Times has fired Wirecutter editor Erin Marquis for leaving obscene messages on a pro-Second Amendment organization after receiving a press release from them.
The calls from Marquis to the Great Lakes Gun Rights Group were posted on YouTube by their parent organization, the National Association for Gun Rights.
The group had upset the editor by issuing a press release in response to a shooting at a Detroit-area high school in November.
“Hi, I’m a journalist with The New York Times,” Marquis said in a voicemail. “I’m just calling to wonder — I have two questions. How do you sleep at night? Aren’t you just, like, a little bit worried that there might be a hell, and when you meet God he might send you there? The only people politicizing this seems to be you, because you’re the only people I got a f-cking press release from. Again, I am from The New York Times, and I am letting everyone in The New York Times know what kind of f-cking a--holes you are. Congrats on being a laughingstock.”
Marquis called back again to leave a second message berating them.
“You f-cking ghouls, I hope that there is a God in heaven, so he judges you when you die,” she stated.
The former editor also took aim at the group on her now-deleted Twitter account, writing that she was "literally shaking with rage."
“We’re not surprised that an angry, liberal, anti-gun New York Times reporter would show their true colors and wish we’d burn in hell,” National Association for Gun Rights President Dudley Brown said in a statement after publishing the messages earlier this month. “We’re just glad she was actually foolish enough to leave two voicemails for us to laugh at, and then publish.”
Marquis served as the secretary for Wirecutter’s union and took aim at the Times before deleting her Twitter account.
“In a pandemic during historic inflation we are begging for scraps from one of the most powerful and profitable media companies in the world only to be constantly being told we aren’t worth it while we make them buckets of money,” she wrote, according to a report from Mediate. “Fun!”
