The New York Times is conducting a leak investigation following a report in The Intercept about a yet-to-be-aired episode of The Daily addressing explosive claims of sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7. Management in recent weeks has pulled at least two dozen staffers, including Daily producers, into meetings in an attempt to understand how internal details about the podcast’s editorial process got out, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The investigation, I’m told, is being led by Charlotte Behrendt, the paper’s director of policy and internal investigations.

In late January, The Intercept reported that the Times had planned to air an episode of The Daily weeks earlier that was based on a December Times investigation, led by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jeffrey Gettleman and coauthored by freelancers Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, about how Hamas “weaponized sexual violence” in the October attack on Israel. But the paper shelved that episode “amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject,” according to The Intercept, which noted that a new script was drafted that “offered major caveats, allowed for uncertainty, and asked open-ended questions that were absent from the original article, which presented its findings as definitive evidence of the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.” The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw and Ryan Grim suggested that producers and the paper faced a conundrum: “run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report.” (Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told The Intercept that the paper does not comment on ongoing reporting and that “there is only one ‘version’ of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.”)

It’s highly unusual for the Times to conduct a leak investigation, with multiple staffers saying this is the first such internal probe they can recall taking place. “It’s not something we do,” said one. “That kind of witch hunt is really concerning.” Though information has leaked out in the past—it’s par for the course for a newsroom as sprawling and influential as the Times—this disclosure presumably cuts deeper because it described internal decision-making around a story that had yet to be published.

“We aren’t going to comment on internal matters,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to Vanity Fair when asked about the leak investigation. “I can tell you that the work of our newsroom requires trust and collaboration, and we expect all of our colleagues to adhere to these values.”

On Wednesday night, The Intercept published a follow-up piece, written by Jeremy Scahill, Grim, and Boguslaw, that further questioned the veracity of the Times investigation and the reporting process behind it, largely through Schwartz’s own comments—which The Intercept translated from Hebrew—from a recent podcast interview she gave. (The Times, for its part, said in a statement to The Intercept that it was “taking quotes out of context.”) And Schwartz’s social media activity has also recently come under scrutiny. The Daily Beast reported earlier this week that the freelancer had “liked multiple posts on X indicating a pro-Israel bias, including one that called for Israel to turn the Gaza Strip ‘into a slaughterhouse,’” and in doing so appeared to violate the Times social media policy, which states that journalists’ social media activity “must not express partisan opinions, promote political views…make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.” Rhoades Ha told the Daily Beast that Schwartz’s “likes” were “unacceptable violations of our company policy” and that the paper was “currently reviewing the matter.”

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war revealed tensions for many newsrooms, including the Times. Disputes spilled out over how staffers could publicly react to the conflict and the framing of Israel’s military response to Hamas’s initial surprise attack on October 7, when approximately 1,200 people were killed and hundreds were taken hostage. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since, and around two million internally displaced.

The Times was among the news organizations scrutinized for their initial framing of the Gaza hospital bombing, as I reported in October, and later issued a rare editors’ note regarding its coverage. A month later, award-winning Times Magazine writer Jazmine Hughes abruptly exited the company after signing a public letter opposing the Israel-Hamas war, which it claimed was Israel’s “attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people.” The letter also criticized media coverage of the war, including a Times editorial that offered support for Israel’s right to defend itself militarily while urging it to protect civilians. Signing such a petition appeared to violate Times policy, which states that staffers cannot “sign ads taking a position on public issues, or lend their name to campaigns…if doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or The Times’s ability to function as neutral observers in covering the news.”

Still, the Israel-Hamas war has also spoken to the Times’ strengths as one of the dominant global news organizations. The paper’s coverage recently won a Polk Award for foreign reporting—a package that includes the original story by Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella—and will likely be in contention for a Pulitzer this spring.