A few years ago, a Times reporter got a message from Charlotte Behrendt.

Behrendt, a lawyer by training who oversees internal investigations in the newsroom, told the reporter she was looking into comments made by a colleague, and asked them if they would want to talk, noting it was completely voluntary. “It definitely did not feel voluntary,” the reporter, who has since left the Times, told me. They agreed to meet with her—an “uncomfortable” experience, they recalled, in which they felt they were being asked to inform on a colleague. Behrendt was looking into potentially sexist comments a male colleague had made about a female colleague to a third party.

What stuck most with the reporter was Behrendt’s approach. “Like a prosecutor,” they said—a description I heard multiple times in conversations with several former and current Times staffers who have over the years either been the subject of Behrendt’s investigations or questioned about information pertaining to them.

While there are a handful non-journalist leaders in the newsroom today, Behrendt’s role is unique. Some call her “management’s hammer”; others, “the inspector general.” Her job, among other things, is to gather facts about internal issues and write reports on her findings for top editors. “Charlotte is usually brought in when we need someone to look into complaints about workplace conduct that may violate company policies,” deputy managing editor Monica Drake, Behrendt’s manager, told Vanity Fair. “Her role in the investigative matters to which she is assigned starts and ends with reporting out what occurred. Her work is invaluable, yet she is not the final arbiter on these matters.” While Behrendt’s title has only officially been “director of policy and internal investigations” since 2021—a role created especially for her within the Newsroom Culture and Careers department formed that year—she’s been handling newsroom investigations for more than 20 years. “Her existence is essentially a legacy of a time when yes, the New York Times Company had HR, but the newsroom essentially ran its own HR,” said one Times alum. Among staff, she is little-known and widely feared.

“If you get called into a meeting and Charlotte is there, that’s generally not a good thing for you. Every room she’s in is a room that has some trouble going on in it,” a former longtime Times editor told me. “I think she holds an enormous number of the Times’ secrets.”

Behrendt has been at the center of some of the biggest controversies at the paper in the last several years, including Glenn Thrush, a political reporter who was removed from covering the White House after allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior; Ali Watkins, a reporter in the Washington bureau whose email and phone records were seized by federal prosecutors as part of a leak investigation, through which a prior romantic relationship with a security aide was revealed; David Furst, the international photo editor who mistreated colleagues and freelancers; Rukmini Callimachi, the star journalist who led the reporting on the since-discredited Caliphate podcast; and Donald McNeil Jr., the veteran science and health reporter who came under fire for allegedly racist remarks he made on a Times-sponsored educational trip to Peru. (Thrush—who apologized for any inappropriate behavior—Watkins, and Callimachi remained at the Times; Furst and McNeil left.)

Most recently, Behrendt played a significant role in a leak investigation that the Times opened following a report in The Intercept about a yet-to-be-aired episode of The Daily. Recent reports about the leak investigation have brought increased awareness of Behrendt and her investigatory style. She interviewed dozens of staffers in an attempt to understand how internal details about the podcast’s editorial process got out, meetings that the New York Times Guild said were rife with “harassment” and “intimidation.” Behrendt questioned employees about their involvement in the Times’ Middle Eastern and North African Employee Resource Group and asked them to hand over the names of the group’s active members, prompting the Times Guild to blow the whistle on what they said was racial targeting. (The Times has rejected the Guild’s assertions.) “If they want to have a corporate investigator, fine—the company can make that choice—but it is certainly at odds with the public positioning the Times likes to do on how it treats its employees,” one Times staffer familiar with Behrendt’s questioning told me. “I’ve been in HR conversations before; this goes well beyond those. It really does feel like a hostile prosecutorial grilling.”

The aforementioned controversies and Behrendt’s inquiries into them are merely the ones that have become public, and even then, in reports about them, her involvement is typically reduced to a sentence. By nature, these matters are private, but in conversations with those who have been questioned by her, a pattern emerges.

Ben Smith, the cofounder of Semafor, was questioned by Behrendt back in 2018, as part of the paper’s investigation into Watkins’s work history and what influence her relationship with a source may have had on her reporting. Watkins was romantically involved with James Wolfe, the security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, while covering the committee for a variety of publications, including BuzzFeed News, where Smith was then the editor in chief. (Watkins said she had not used Wolfe as a source during their three-year relationship, which ended before she was hired by the Times.)

“I thought the way they handled that was totally inappropriate,” Smith told me. “I only dealt with Charlotte, and I believe I only spoke to her once. I was taken aback that she seemed to see her job as to prosecute a Times reporter who hadn’t done anything wrong, rather than to defend her.” Following the conclusion of the internal review, then executive editor Dean Baquet said Watkins had “made some poor judgments” and that he had “decided to reassign her to a position in New York for a fresh start, where she will be closely supervised and have a senior mentor.”

Two former Times journalists subjected to Behrendt’s investigations who spoke to Vanity Fair had similar experiences. One I spoke to said Behrendt was “bullying” and “threatening” during the course of a probe they considered to be “based on rumor and innuendo.” Behrendt, they said, “approached it as if I was a criminal from the very start. I felt very strongly from the beginning that she had determined what the outcome would be and was trying to bully me into proving her narrative.”

The other former Times journalist questioned by Behrendt likened her mode of operation to “police interrogator meets prosecutor.” This journalist said they felt that Behrendt pressured them into leaving with a threatening ultimatum—that if they didn’t take the exit deal the Times was offering, the Times might have to open an investigation into them. “She was like, if you don’t take the deal by the end of the week, I’ll have no choice but to sit down with every member of your team and ask them if you’ve ever made them feel uncomfortable, or if there’s anything you’ve ever said or done that might be seen as unprofessional,” the journalist said. “It was the opposite of all of the professionalism and humanity that I had come to expect from the Times.” (Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha disagreed with this characterization of events.)

“Charlotte is a consummate professional who conducts inquiries with rigor, but also with fairness and integrity,” Rhoades Ha said in a statement. “These inevitably involve uncomfortable situations. People who have been involved in internal investigations may not agree with all aspects of the process. Charlotte’s role is to gather and establish facts; she does not determine the results of her inquiries, including what if any disciplinary action might be taken.”

Behrendt, who declined to be interviewed for this story, came to the Times in 2000 after working as a labor and employment lawyer at Proskauer Rose, the law firm that has for years been the Times’ go-to counsel for labor relations. She quickly moved from the Times’ labor relations team—where she began handling newsroom investigations—into the newsroom, working on various employment-related issues, including contract negotiations with the Guild; over the next decade, her role expanded to include advising masthead editors and managers throughout the newsroom on personnel matters and drawing up newsroom contracts and policies.

She currently functions somewhere between an HR and general counsel role, but, while she works closely with both departments, she reports to neither; she instead rolls up under the paper’s Culture and Careers department, which Drake oversees. The department was created in 2021 to help staff develop their careers and improve the culture of the newsroom, following an internal report that found the Times to be a “difficult environment” for some staffers. “Charlotte’s role existed before the team was created, but we felt it important to situate it in a group that helps reinforce a healthy workplace culture,” Drake said.

Former Times staffers who worked with Behrendt in various capacities generally remember her as smart, discreet, and tough. But she could be harsh, according to one former Times editor. Behrendt’s advice was often “to go for pretty big discipline,” they said. “She was Miss Chop-Their-Heads-Off. And I thought that was too draconian a lot of the time.”

She could also be a helpful resource. “It was never clear whom to turn to for internal complaints, so people would go to Charlotte and say, I’m having trouble with my managers, etc.,” said the Times alum. “She wasn’t originally just a disciplinarian. She worked with grown-ups on the masthead like Bill Schmidt, John Geddes, and Janet Elder who had the power to stop assholes and manage conflict,” the alum added. “As the Times got a lot bigger and labor-management tensions grew, Charlotte’s role changed from arbitrator and judge to cop and prosecutor.”

“What I dislike about the way corporate discipline is handled at the Times is that it is now possible for HR to convict people on charges that are straight out of the courtrooms of Stalin or Mao,” McNeil told me in an email. “One is accused of ‘violating Times core values.’ But what the hell does that mean? It’s a catch-all that permits punishment for anything the bosses don’t like.”

McNeil, who spent more than four decades at the Times, resigned under pressure in 2021, after The Daily Beast reported that students and their parents had complained about comments McNeil made on the 2019 Peru trip, including the N-word. He apologized in a note to colleagues upon leaving the Times and later published a four-part response to the allegations on Medium, where he acknowledged he had repeated the slur in the context of a conversation with students about racist language, in which he asked if someone had used the word. “It’s not that I think there should be no one in charge of discipline in the newsroom. It’s the way Charlotte did the job: the secrecy, the mean-spiritedness, the prosecutorial attitude,” McNeil added. “To me, putting a humorless lawyer from a union-busting firm in charge of newsroom discipline—which is to say, in charge of the internal spirit of the place—was a recipe for anger and resentment and a climate of fear.”

“One core value they are constantly punishing people for is: ‘Thou shalt not publicly embarrass The New York Times.’ Almost no one is fired unless their offense is first broadcast on Twitter or the Daily Beast or Vanity Fair or whatever,” McNeil said in his email. “In 2019, after private complaints, I got a letter placed in my file; two years later, after the Daily Beast article, I was ousted on the same charges despite our union contract proviso against double jeopardy.” (“Disciplinary decisions are based on the facts, not on media coverage,” Rhoades Ha said. “Donald was reprimanded in 2019 and his eventual departure involved more than one issue.”)

Today the Times newsroom is a different place than it was 10 years ago. It is larger than ever and harder to manage, with no shortage of avenues—social media, Slack, various open letters—for increasingly vocal employees to express concerns and grievances about Times coverage and practices. Management feels they have to provide more guidance across the board and take concerted moves to protect the institution. Behrendt’s evolved role seems to be one such mechanism. As one former senior editor put it, “The fact that she has internal investigations in her title is a character change of astonishing order.”