ODP hires, fires Women’s Outreach Coordinator

The story of the Ohio Democratic Party’s hiring and same day firing (or did she jump?) of Coordinator for Women’s Outreach Megan Pappada is already everwhere, but there’s a lot more background on it at Writes Like She Talks.

5. I emailed Scott Piepho, Jeff Coryell (on behalf of the Cleveland Hts post), Todd Hoffman (ODP online communications director) and Randy Borntrager (ODP Communications Director) with the link. I did the citizen journalism thing I try to do: I said, great news re: the new position, but I found this link. I don’t know Megan, what do you think?

6. That was all within an hour or so on Thursday afternoon. I did not receive responses from Jeff or Scott but did receive one from the ODP thanking me for bringing it to their attention and that they would look into it. Late Friday morning, I spoke with Todd Hoffman and he informed me that Megan had resigned.

Here’s Scott Piepho’s post on the matter:

From what I can put together, after hiring Megan, someone discovered that first semester of her freshman year she wrote a letter to the editor of the OSU student newspaper about race relations. In it, she took some positions that were problematic and others that probably could have been expressed better. And from what I’ve been told by a person close to the matter, Megan was let go. Both the post on ODP blog and the podcast on Odeo were quietly deleted. I wrote ODP for comment and have heard nothing.

A person close to Megan has conveyed her wish that I simply remove my post and let life go on. I hope she will forgive me for declining to do so. First off, it’s not how I roll. The post wasn’t in error at the time it was written, nor have I decided in retrospect that it was unfair — those are the only reasons I would delete a post. I certainly won’t delete it for the sake of papering over the party’s mistake.

Ah, but the ODP would. Here’s their post on Megan Pappada’s hiring. Nothing there. There used to be a podcast too.

Buckeye State Blog, to it’s credit, challenged the ODP on this, but then took it back.

Here’s the post to the Readers’ Forum of OSU’s Lantern from 2000 that got Pappada fired- a clear cut case of thoughtcrime.