New York Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday night threatened legal action against Condé Nast, a week after the company fired four staffers who confronted its head of human resources over the restructuring of Teen Vogue.
Speaking before a crowd of around 100 people at a NewsGuild of New York rally outside Condé Nast’s 1 World Trade Center office, James decried the firings as a form of “union-busting” and demanded the company rehire the fired individuals.
“This is an injustice,” she said. “Condé Nast, I’ll see you in court.”
James told TheWrap the state was “looking at our legal options” when asked if there was any pending litigation, though a press aide later said there was no litigation in the works.
“The employment terminations were lawful and based on clear violations of company policies,” a Condé Nast spokesperson said in a statement. “We have an obligation to protect our workplace from harassment and intimidation. If the Attorney General has concerns, we are happy to respond to her.”
The comments came after Condé Nast fired four employees — Jasper Lo, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker; Jake Lahut, a senior politics reporter for WIRED; Alma Avalle, a digital staffer at Bon Appétit; and Ben Dewey, a video staffer with Condé Nast Entertainment — and suspended five others out of a group of 20 for trying to question chief people officer Stan Duncan last week over the company’s decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue and lay off several staffers, including its editor-in-chief.
Condé Nast filed a federal labor complaint against Conde United, the union representing most Condé Nast staffers, and accused the four employees of exhibiting “extreme” and “gross” misconduct. But videos from the incident showed the group attempting to ask Duncan questions and Duncan repeatedly steering them away from his office with refusals, bringing the company’s description into question.
The company said last week the videos had “several additional minutes” missing. It has not made the additional footage public.
The rally on Wednesday marked the culmination of Conde United’s full-throated effort to protest the firings of the “fired four,” as they’ve dubbed the group. Roughly 100 people turned out in 40-degree weather wearing union shirts, buttons and stickers to protest the decision — including one baby with a sticker on its beanie.
The one-hour program featured speeches from Avalle and Dewey, multiple local and state lawmakers and laid-off Teen Vogue politics staffer Lex McMenamin, who said the group was “bringing reality to their doorstep, whether or not they want to look out the door.”
McMenamin told TheWrap they were “heartened” by the reaction from the union and its supporters over both the firings and the lay-offs, saying “people in all of our lives benefited from the existence of Teen Vogue.”
“Either we had younger siblings who were coming out as trans for the first time, who found out about explainers on how to tell your family on Teen Vogue, or some of the only reporting that people were able to find of trans kids in which trans kids spoke was on Teen Vogue,” they said. “This is the case for so many issues, whether it’s climate to growing into your career or whatever — across the board, people were able to find coverage of young people’s lived experiences that weren’t represented in other places because other outlets didn’t care the same way that we care.”
The union has filed its own federal labor complaint against Condé Nast along with multiple grievances alleging violations of its contract, which it ratified in May 2024. The group has also demanded the company provide its own video footage of the incident, according to an information request it sent to the company on Monday and obtained by TheWrap. It is specifically seeking “emails, text messages, memos, video recordings, audio recordings” and other communications related to the decision to fire the group.
“If they have extra evidence, they should come out with it, but I don’t think there is any,” Dewey told TheWrap. “To the best of my recollection, it was the same as what you saw in the video. It was a pretty calm and reasonable attempt to have a conversation with our leaders, and that’s what we did.”
Dewey, who took the videos of the incident, said the footage of the incident “speaks for itself” and allows people to “see what’s going on for yourself in that video.” He said he believes the company intentionally targeted union leaders. “All of us have been pretty active in the union, so that’s what it looks like to me,” Dewey said.
But, despite the company’s hard-line stance against their actions and apparent refusal to reverse the firings, Dewey said he still wants to return to Condé Nast. “I love my job,” he shared. “I’m a camera person, I really enjoy doing that, and we’ll see what happens.”
