Three fired staffers from the U.S. military’s independent news organization Stars and Stripes sued the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday in an effort to halt their terminations, citing them as “unlawful” and retaliatory.
The fired employees — Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin, publisher Max D. Lederer Jr. and Middle East reporter Lara Korte — seek an immediate restraining order from the defendants.
Slavin, Korte and Lederer filed the 45-page lawsuit against Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Hegseth and Hegseth’s Principal Deputy Assistant Andrew Brey. They claim that their dismissals from the legacy news outlet came as retaliation for “unflattering” coverage and that such action violated their First Amendment rights.
“Our goal is to protect the rights of service members and their families to a free and independent press,” the three said in a statement. “Stars and Stripes has served them for generations, and that independence is essential to keeping military communities fully and accurately informed. This lawsuit is about safeguarding that mission and ensuring our civilian and military journalists can do their jobs without retaliation.”
The staffers specifically alleged that the Pentagon is violating their First Amendment rights by seeking to fire them over their public comments defending the newspaper’s editorial independence and, in part, over Stars and Stripes’ reporting about deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
“We need to be able to provide independent news to service Members,” Slavin, the editor-in-chief, said in the complaint, as obtained and reviewed by TheWrap. “If we can’t do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that’s the foxhole.”
“I’m working for Stars and Stripes … not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker,” Korte added. “I’m here to cover the military community.”
The Stars and Stripes publisher, who spent 30 years at the paper, was fired because he had refused a request from his leadership to fire Korte and Slavin, according to the lawsuit. He ultimately decided to step down and retire. He was cited for “insubordination” by the Pentagon for comments he made in his resignation letter.
“It has become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leader of the Department of Defense has for the organization,” he wrote in an Aug. 18 all-hands email.
The plaintiffs argue in the complaint that their Stars and Stripes’ reporting, which found that roughly 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln had endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail and other physical hardships affecting sailors’ physical and mental health, led to their dismissals from the organization.
The very next day, Brey directed Lederer to deliver separation notices to Slavin and Korte, explicitly citing their CBS statements.
The dismissals escalated a months-long battle over the future of Stars and Stripes, which is partly funded by the Defense Department but has long operated with editorial independence. An Aug. 21 directive from the Department of Defense still said that the Stars and Stripes’ products are unofficial and that its editorial operations will remain independent and “free from censorship or propaganda.”
Slavin specifically outlined one instance of the Pentagon interfering with the publication’s independence in the complaint, explaining a redline he would not cross with respect to Stripes’ independence.
“Don’t run a perfectly accurate story, run this instead,” he said of feedback he would not accept from the Department of Defense. “Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a redline.”
