Jezebel, a women-focused website that launched in 2007 and became an edgy and often transgressive staple of feminist internet culture, has removed more than 100 articles from its website with racy, inappropriate or controversial words in the headlines.
A Washington Post review of the site found “404 error” messages — indicating that a page could not be found — in place of the articles, some of which were many years old, that had used sexually explicit and sometimes vulgar words in headlines.
The changes have prompted protests from former Jezebel staffers, some of whose bylines were on the articles.
In a series of emails, William Sagan, the publisher of Paste Magazine — which bought Jezebel in 2023 after it was shut down by a prior owner, G/O Media — defended the website and said that no articles had been targeted for removal. He said that readers can still find articles on Jezebel’s website featuring the sexually explicit and vulgar words.
But it wasn’t just R-rated words or raunchy stories that have disappeared: Articles with headlines mentioning the word abortion — a focus of Jezebel’s coverage over the years — are also missing. Many articles are unavailable on the Jezebel website but are still accessible through Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a tool that captures old webpages.
Some others were lighthearted: A pop culture piece titled, “S— Gets Real in the New Mockingjay Trailer,” is gone. An article called, “Some Actual Real Facts About Abortion” has also vanished. “The Weird World Of Penis Lengthening” isn’t there either.
An item called “Dick Cheney, Superhero” was also removed.
“Simply go to Jezebel and search on the word abortion or f— or dick. The search result on Jezebel shows articles with that word in the title,” Sagan said. “For example, there are over 1,000 articles on the website today that have abortion in the title, let alone the thousands of other articles where abortion is in the body of the article. Whoever is telling you this is lying and defaming Jezebel and the outstanding and frequent coverage of abortion by Jezebel over the past 25 years.”
(Profanity on the Jezebel site and in Sagan’s email were spelled out.)
When provided with links to dozens of broken article links, Sagan said that although “no article has ever been deleted from Jezebel,” the site will “occasionally move old articles into draft status for a multitude of reasons” including those that have broken links or outdated third-party content, or “to fix significant content or grammar problems or for other reasons.” They’re unpublished — not deleted, he said — until an editor can review and repost the articles.
Sagan also said that Jezebel has “published over 275,000 articles” and that what’s missing represents a small portion of the total archive.
The removals were not specific to sexual or vulgar language, he said: “There are still thousands of articles with racy headlines in the article in production on Jezebel. If this was a racy headline purge all of them would be gone.”
Former Jezebel staffers, however, expressed their outrage and questioned whether abortion coverage had been singled out.
“Jezebel was synonymous with unflinching, powerful abortion coverage that shaped the narrative across the United States,” said Susan Rinkunas, a former Jezebel senior writer who co-founded the outlet Autonomy News. “To see that the current owner is deleting or un-publishing stories about abortion is unconscionable and shows that he is not fit to run this website.”
Rich Juzwiak, another former senior writer, said the decision to remove articles was disappointing.
“It’s just really disrespectful to people’s work and also to the audience’s intelligence and also to the audience — period — to just take this archive of really good work by my colleagues, really important work that in some cases define what feminism is on the internet, and then to just throw it in the trash because it’s not advertiser-friendly,” he said. “You know, for better, for worse, commercially Jezebel was not particularly advertiser friendly by design.”
Sagan said he has received no complaints from advertisers about its language.
Kylie Cheung, a former staff writer, called the removals an “outrage” in an email to Sagan shared with The Post: “You are deleting them from the public discourse and part of the public record.”
Journalism ethics experts said that any decision to remove articles should be a careful one — and one that’s explained.
“I personally think that taking down or depublishing material is always problematic, because, number one, it is a usually futile attempt to rewrite history,” said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at University of Minnesota. “If a news site’s going to make a decision to take down something, I think, number one, transparency demands that they share with their readers why they’re doing it.”
Eric Deggans, a journalism and media ethics professor at Washington and Lee University, agreed. “You want to be as transparent as possible, particularly when you’re dealing with stuff that’s been published already that people may have read,” he said. “If you’re changing it or removing it, people should have some sense of what you’re doing.”
Some of the former staffers were particularly upset that a story featuring former staffer Jia Tolentino’s interview with a woman who had an abortion at 32 weeks had been removed. Like others, the 2016 article is not available on Jezebel’s website but is searchable on the Wayback Machine, which has a saved version from Oct. 4, 2026.
The story, Rinkunas said, was “insanely viral for Jezebel at the time” and had a cultural impact. “People have since referenced it as a reason they changed their minds on abortion access later in pregnancy,” she said. “It’s such an important story for Jezebel.”
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