Jimmy Soni, a former managing editor at the Huffington Post who enjoyed a meteoric rise at the site, was reportedly under investigation for sexual harassment before his abrupt departure earlier this year.
That’s the scoop from Gawker’s J.K. Trotter, who cited “two current HuffPost staffers and six former ones” as saying that Soni used the outlet’s Editorial Fellows program as a target for his romantic conquests.
Trotter reported that Soni “apparently bragged about his intentions quite openly” and had even joked about using one class of fellows — laden with white, blonde women — to “find myself a wife.”
The report provided some clues about Soni’s mysterious change in roles at HuffPost. He stepped down as managing editor in May to take over the website’s India edition. Then last month, editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington said Soni was longer with the site.
Those moves, according to Trotter’s report, were merely intended to bide time for a plausible public explanation as lawyers for AOL, HuffPost’s parent company, began setting up interviews with employees in New York City, where Soni had been previously based.
It marks quite a fall for Soni following an astonishing rise at the site in 2012, when he made the leap from Huffington’s chief of staff to managing editor in just nine months.
