In my last post exploring why Jill Abramson was fired as executive editor of the New York Times by Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s publisher, I cited excerpts from an April 28th e-mail that the Times Company C.E.O., Mark Thompson, sent to Abramson. In it he heaped praise on her, so I asked: “What else happened between Thompson’s April 28th plea for her to stay longer and her termination by Sulzberger, eleven days later, on Friday, May 9th?” And the latest detail to emerge involves what Sulzberger has told people at the Times was Abramson’s betrayal of trust. Knowing this makes it easier to see why Sulzberger insists that the issue was not one of gender but rather of management and honesty.

One incident I described in that time period was a lunch between Dean Baquet and Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian’s U.S. operation, who was being courted by the Times to run its digital efforts. I wrote last Thursday, “What Baquet did not know, until Gibson herself mentioned it to him at lunch, I’m told, is that she was offered a managing-editor job comparable to his own. He was, it is fair to say, unenthusiastic, and even angered.” After the lunch, Baquet complained to Sulzberger that he had been blindsided. He said he had no idea that Gibson would be ranked alongside him as a co-managing editor; he also raised his general, long-simmering frustration with Abramson’s autocratic management style. Was this enough to get her fired? Given the tone of the e-mail from Thompson, something in the story still seemed to be missing.

An answer, reported by Dylan Byers of Politico late yesterday, was that Abramson had been dishonest with Sulzberger and Thompson. Extremely well-informed sources at the paper familiar with the reasons for Abramson’s dismissal have also given this account to The New Yorker: they say that Abramson was, essentially, fired for cause, for lying to Sulzberger that she had squared Gibson’s rank and arrival with Baquet when, in fact, she had not. The sources say she misled Sulzberger when she said, in person and by e-mail, that she had consulted with Baquet about the offer to Gibson and had worked it all out in detail with him. Baquet was furious. At a dinner with Sulzberger, Baquet basically described the incident as a humiliation. He could no longer work with Abramson. It was him or her. (Politico reported that, when Sulzberger shared Baquet’s distress with Abramson, she persisted in assuring him that she had told Baquet everything.) According to this account, her breach with Baquet and Sulzberger was irrevocable. Sulzberger decided to fire Abramson and replace her with Baquet, thus making him the first African-American executive editor of the paper—but under the most sour, trying, and confused circumstances.

Janine Gibson, speaking publicly for the first time about her meetings with Baquet, clouded the case against Abramson somewhat, at least where the accusation of lying is concerned. “I can’t speak to Dean’s understanding, but it was made clear to me that everybody knew everything about what was being discussed,” she told me. “Jill was explicit in our initial conversation when she told me, ‘The first thing I have to do is talk to Dean.’ I’m mortified that these discussions are in public and feel very strongly that Jill should not have been hung out to dry when she behaved honorably and was trying to do what she thought was best for the New York Times.” Gibson has told friends that, not only did she meet with Baquet for lunch on Monday May 5th, she met that morning with him and Abramson together for more than an hour. She had a separate meeting with Sulzberger and Thompson.

Had Sulzberger and Abramson had a more confident and mutually respectful relationship, if there had been greater trust built up over their time together, Times sources say, they might have weathered this crisis. It might have been seen as a matter of unfortunate miscommunication—not a lie, not the cause for a final break. Abramson might have survived. In fact, the paper itself has, arguably, never been better. Instead, Sulzberger could endure the situation no longer and fired her. (Abramson could not be reached for comment.)

Sulzberger has been, to say the least, an imperfect steward of the paper; he has presided over some disastrous investments (About.com) and disastrous appointments (Howell Raines). But he was surely smart enough to know that firing Abramson, the first female editor of the paper, would set off nightmarish publicity.

The suggestion that Sulzberger may have practiced a double standard in pay must be especially painful for him. He can be faulted for many things, but he has championed the traditional news values of the paper and prides himself on being a leader in diversity, showing a far more welcoming attitude toward gay and minority employees than previous publishers; he hired the first woman to lead the newsroom, and now the first African-American, and has made a point of urging diversity in general. And so it must have been especially galling for him to be at the center of criticism regarding gender, and it had to play a role in his finally coming out with such a sharp, counter-punching statement about Abramson’s management of the paper and its employees.

Almost from the start, Sulzberger and Abramson had difficult relations, which only frayed with time. Sulzberger, as he said in a public statement issued Saturday, heard repeated reports from people in the Times newsroom in the past few years that Abramson was given to repeated instances of “arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues.” In a review of her performance as executive editor, he even told Abramson, not for the first time, that the way she was said to treat colleagues could not continue. It is true that Abramson was not necessarily any more peremptory or erratic than male predecessors like Raines or A. M. Rosenthal. At the same time, she was working in a more modern atmosphere in which there is a greater expectation that executives will be more considerate. Still, there is a legitimate question, one that some women at the Times have raised, about whether a man with similar behavior would be viewed the same way.

The critical view of Abramson, it is fair to say, was shared by many of her senior newsroom colleagues—those who worked with her most closely. They say she had terrific gut instincts when it came to the news; she had particularly keen instincts on Washington stories and the way political stories were likely to play out over time. But they also described someone whose temper was sharp and unpredictable, and who was absent from the newsroom more than she should have been—most notably during Hurricane Sandy. In fact, their descriptions generally jibe with Sulzberger’s belated, but sharp statement describing her shortcomings as a manager.

While colleagues agreed it really was difficult at times to work with her, they also acknowledged another side. They say she was capable of enormous personal kindnesses and was especially encouraging of young women in the newsroom. She was, and is, in other words, a complicated person, who might have been, arguably, better suited to the work of an investigative reporter than the leader of a big, fractious, evolving newsroom in the modern era.