In August 2014, Arianna Huffington, the wealthy, Greek-born co-founder of the Huffington Post, got a brief e-mail from her friend Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria, the television host and journalist, had recently come under intense media scrutiny amid allegations that he had lifted passages from other writers’ work and used them without proper attribution—new instances of an offense that had already led to his suspension from both CNN and Time, in 2012. During the first kerfuffle, Zakaria had acknowledged making “a terrible mistake”; now he was publicly denying the charges. Either way, Zakaria wasn’t getting in touch with Huffington just to lament his recent woes. He was e-mailing on August 19 to express his unhappiness that the Huffington Post’s media desk had picked up the recent plagiarism story. He found it very painful. (Zakaria did not respond to a request to be interviewed. Huffington also declined my repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, but in a written response to questions, she denied receiving a complaint from Zakaria, even though she did.)

The e-mail had arrived at a pivotal time for Huffington. Rumors were circulating in the newsroom about her uneasy relationship with Tim Armstrong, the C.E.O. of AOL, the company that had purchased the HuffPost for $315 million three years earlier. An idea had already been floated to transform Huffington into a sort of semi-retired figurehead who would perform ceremonial tasks without wielding any real power—a covert operation, The New York Times later reported, code-named “Popemobile.” A looming corporate shake-up added still more uncertainty. At the time of the Zakaria incident, Verizon was eyeing AOL for a takeover—a $4.4 billion deal that would come to be announced 10 months later.

Huffington, meanwhile, had no intention of relinquishing power at the organization she had co-founded nearly a decade earlier, in 2005, against such long odds. Despite a relative lack of experience in journalism, business, and technology—as a wealthy divorcee who had written several books and unsuccessfully run for governor of California—she had turned the Huffington Post into one of the most recognizable media brands of our time. Within a decade, the site became part of the media firmament and Huffington became a global brand unto herself. She was a regular at the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos; a ubiquitous talking head on television; a budding lifestyle guru; and the keeper of one of the more prodigious Rolodexes in the industry. She counted among her friends everyone from Charlie Rose to Ann Getty and Henry Kissinger to Barbara Walters. She divided her time between a mansion in Brentwood, California, and an $8 million apartment in SoHo.

During the site’s earliest days, the support of Huffington’s friends had supplied a patina of credibility to the fledgling organization. (It was national news, for instance, when the late Nora Ephron agreed to lead a vertical dedicated to divorce.) But as the Huffington Post grew, Huffington’s friendships became an increasing source of concern and potential conflicts in the newsroom. According to numerous sources, Huffington protected her allies aggressively, even intemperately. The Zakaria incident was a perfect example. “That made her extremely angry,” recalls a former editor who was in the newsroom that day.

It didn’t matter that the story was being picked up across the digital landscape, or that Politico and other organizations made a strong case that Zakaria was guilty of plagiarism. Huffington, this former editor recalls, wanted to fire the people who she believed were responsible for running the HuffPost’s story: Jack Mirkinson, the media editor; Gazelle Emami, the deputy features editor; and Catherine Taibi, the author of the article.