Ex-NYT reporter Nellie Bowles rips paper’s ‘insane’ cancel culture, says editor called her spouse Bari Weiss a ‘f—ing Nazi’

Former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles said she was “disgusted” by the cancel culture at the liberal publication – including one editor who accused her future partner of being a “f-cking Nazi.” 

Bowles, who is married to former Times opinion page editor Bari Weiss, thought she landed her dream job when she was hired by the Gray Lady in 2017, but she soon realized that the leftist “movement” had taken over the newsroom, she said Thursday.

A self-professed former progressive, Bowles spoke to Fox News Digital on Thursday about her book, “Morning After the Revolution,” which chronicles the popularity of the leftist ideology in recent years and how it hasn’t worked in practice — especially at The Times.

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The journalist cited the fallout from the now-infamous Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed that sparked a revolt among staffers in June 2020, with many of them taking to social media and posting the phrase: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

“I wasn’t going to tweet the tweet we all had to tweet that day, and that was really the final moment for me in the movement within the paper,” said Bowles, who left The Times in 2021.

“Because once people saw that I wasn’t going to tweet the tweet, that to them was picking a side. And we all had to raise our voices together and try to get the editors fired… We all had to shout together to get everyone who touched that thing fired. And I just wasn’t willing to do that.”

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Cotton’s op-ed, titled “Send in the Troops,” argued in favor of then-President Trump using the military to quell the looting, arson and attacks on law enforcement in the wake of George Floyd’s death while being arrested by Minneapolis cops.

“I lost friends immediately, friends who were demanding that I post [the tweet],” Bowles said. “Anyone who didn’t post that was seen as very suspicious from that day onward. In retrospect, it was so nuts.”

The firestorm of criticism caused the paper’s leadership to announce that the op-ed “fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” 

Two members of the Times Opinion staff, James Bennet and Adam Rubenstein, were ultimately pushed out as a result. Another staffer, James Dao, was reassigned to a different department. 

Bowles described Weiss, who worked for Bennet, as a dissenting voice that rattled cages at the paper.

The two sparked up a romance after Bowles joined the Times. One night, while Bowles was having drinks with her editor and other staffers, the editor accused her of dating a “f—ing Nazi,” she recounted in her book.

“I just sort of was awkward and uncomfortable, and I didn’t know what to do,” Bowles said. “It was so strange that this was happening, and it was so strange how quickly you go from in the good to in the very, very bad. And it was surreal. Like I felt a little, like, out of body for a moment. And then the moment passed and that editor just thought all my ideas were pretty bad after that night.” 

Bowles also got blowback from friends about their relationship.

“At the time, I was in very good stead at the paper, and I was a good progressive, and I knew Bari was a dissident liberal and… I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just met her and I fell in love,” Bowles told Fox News Digital. “I had a friend from college who reached out to me and said I need to publicly disavow Bari, that in order to stay in the good, if I want to keep dating her, I need to publicly disavow her. And I was just like, ‘What are you talking about?! Like in what world?!’ Like, it was so insane.”

Weiss, who ultimately quit in July 2020 after the internal eruption over the Cotton op-ed, penned a scathing letter to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in which she said she faced constant bullying for having differing views and declared, “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

Another eye-opening moment for Bowles was the February 2021 ousting of veteran Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr.

McNeil, who had been at the Times for 45 years, was the subject of ire in the newsroom after it was reported that he had used the “n-word” in a discussion about the slur itself on a 2019 college educational trip he led. He resigned shortly after.  

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“He was done so dirty in how he was smeared,” Bowles said. “He was someone I really respected and his work I really respected. Like, this is a guy who was early covering AIDS when everyone was scared to talk about the topic. This guy was doing deep reporting. He’s incredible and had given his life to the institution and in many ways was having a kind of career that I thought I would have as a longtime Times person.”

Bowles added that her Times colleagues “smeared” McNeil so “casually” and that it was “a deep shaming.”

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“They’re trying to make it so his children and grandchildren will be embarrassed,” Bowles said. “They’re trying to frame it as though this man shouted a slur. It just isn’t true. It’s false.” 

Bowles said the saga had a “big impact” on her because it revealed how the movement wanted to “figure out something you’ve done wrong,” adding “there’s no one pure enough to survive a full investigation by the movement.”

“Part of me also was just disgusted by an institution that would allow for someone to be treated that way. And for someone who’d given their life to the institution to be treated that way. And so it really struck me. And it helped me become less naive about the nature of any for-profit company,” she concluded. 

Bowles married Weiss after leaving The Times.. They launched The Free Press, a news and commentary site, in 2022.