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Malcolm Gladwell ‘Puzzled’ by New Yorker’s Firing of Jeff Toobin for Zoom Masturbation

“They just assumed he had done something terrible, but never told us what the terrible thing was,” Gladwell said.

Malcolm Gladwell “couldn’t find any intellectual justification” for The New Yorker firing Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating during a Zoom call, he said in a New York Times article published Tuesday. Toobin was fired in October after Vice News reported on the incident, where the longtime legal writer was seen touching his penis in front of his colleagues. “They just assumed he had done something terrible, but never told us what the terrible thing was,” Gladwell, a New Yorker writer himself, said. Similar acts of impropriety haven’t appeared to bother the longtime public intellectual. In 2019, Gladwell told New York Magazine he once flew on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. In a separate interview, he stated Joe Paterno—the Penn State football coach fired for not reporting allegations of child sexual abuse against an assistant— “essentially did nothing wrong.”