Free Speech, In-House Counsel

Senior Attorney Fired For Cruel Commentary On Las Vegas Shooting

She deserved to get fired. She doesn't deserve to become a pawn.

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Hayley Geftman-Gold, vice-president and senior counsel in strategic transactions at CBS, was summarily fired today after posting questionable Facebook commentary on the Las Vegas shooting. So, you know, if you’re looking for an in-house gig with a major media conglomerate and have a modicum of impulse control on social media, you’re in luck!

Geftman-Gold’s remarks on Facebook somehow got captured in a screenshot and started making the rounds on Twitter. It’s just one more lesson that even “private” social media platforms like Facebook aren’t really private and everyone should maintain a sense of professionalism out there:

“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often republican gun toters.”

It’s that second sentence that got Geftman-Gold into hot water. While modern country music is, as country legend Steve Earle points out, “hip-hop for people who are afraid of black people,” the fact that it sucks and its listeners are statistically more likely to be the sort of people parading around social media saying, “today is not the time to politicize this issue #MAGA,” doesn’t mean they deserve to be dead. As a general rule, if you say you’re not sympathetic to people who get murdered, you’re on the wrong side of things. And companies are going to fire you for that because generally they strive to project an anti-murder vibe.

And this isn’t necessarily fair. Judge Roy Moore is about to be a U.S. Senator and he said the children gunned down in Sandy Hook got what was coming to them because “we’ve forgotten the law of God,” which in fairness isn’t entirely wrong, because God kinda backed gun control as a long-term goal (Isaiah 2:4). Alex Jones has spent years pretending that massacre was staged. Pat Robertson said 9/11 was caused by feminists. When it comes to tragedy, right-wingers can proudly express how little they care about victims without any consequence. That’s frustrating, but it’s not an invitation to mimic that psychopathology.

By the way, where are the Republican free speech warriors? Remember when Google firing an employee telling everyone that women were bad engineers was a constitutional crisis? And where are the folks who defend people like Amy Wax and Larry Alexander for writing thinly veiled white superiority screeds? Their rights receive no end of support from people like Tucker Carlson. His publication, the Daily Caller, is already publicly blasting Geftman-Gold. Consistency is the hobgoblin of people with, I suppose, a conscience.

Geftman-Gold’s comments may have earned a pink slip for making CBS look bad, but that’s where this should end. Sadly, she’s going to get dragged through the mud on almost every cable news show tonight, and probably get doxxed by some alt-right scumbags. Welcome to the distraction zone! An impolitic statement on Facebook is red meat for an outrage engine f**king desperate to change the narrative from “hey, have you noticed other industrialized countries don’t have these kind of things?” Because “liberal woman is mean” is truly the headline to take away from the events of the last 24 hours.

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Which, actually, kind of proves Geftman-Gold’s first sentence.

CBS Fires Legal Exec Over Las Vegas Shooting Comments [Variety]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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