Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro and reporter Michelle Fields, who filed a criminal complaint against Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski last week over an alleged assault, both resigned from the news outlet late Sunday night.
Both staffers’ resignations were first reported by Buzzfeed and later confirmed on Twitter. Their decision to leave the website, which has faced a steady stream of criticism over its favorable coverage of Trump, came just 24 hours after internal messages from Breitbart editor Joel Pollak were leaked to the press.
The messages showed Pollack demanding that his staff refrain from publicly defending Fields.
“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields told BuzzFeed. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”
Shapiro later added that Breitbart “under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew [Breitbart’s] legacy.” Andrew Breitbart was a notable conservative activist and commentator who died in 2012, just four years after founding Breitbart News.
“Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro said. “Both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion. Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue.”
“Finally, in the ultimate indignity, they undermined Michelle completely by running a poorly-evidenced conspiracy theory as their lead story in which Michelle and Terris had somehow misidentified Lewandowski,” Shapiro said.
On Monday morning, Shapiro’s former employer published a piece titled, “Ben Shapiro betrays loyal Breitbart readers in pursuit of Fox News contributorship.” The article was first posted under Breitbart writer William Bigelow’s byline, but later changed to Breitbart News before it was deleted from the site entirely.
Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella also resigned from the publication last Friday, claiming he’d reached a point where he “couldn’t give 100 percent of myself and best thing to do was to let them know that.”
Bardella later told CNN he believes his former employer is lying about the incident involving Fields in order to protect Trump.
“I think that they’ve been looking for a reason to disprove something when all the evidence from the Washington Post reporter’s first-hand account, to the bruises on Michelle’s arm, all the photos and video clips that we’ve seen strongly suggest that Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was the one who did this,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon.
“Are you saying they’re lying?” Lemon asked Bardella.
“Yes, I am,” he responded.
Aside from its deleted article about Shapiro, Breitbart has not commented on the departure of three of its staffers.
