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Former Huffington Post editor Jimmy Soni investigated for sexual harassment

Former Huffington Post managing editor Jimmy Soni is being investigated by AOL lawyers for sexual harassment, according to a new Gawker report.

Soni had been bouncing from position to position for months. In May, he stepped down from his editor role to help launch Huffington Post India. Then, last month, it was announced he was stepping down from that role to focus on writing a book.

But it wasn't just about a book: "Numerous current and former employees have told Capital that Soni's initial change in roles was widely viewed as a demotion brought about in the wake of internal complaints about his management style and his interactions with certain employees," our colleagues at Capital New York reported last month.

Now, according to Gawker's J.K. Trotter, Soni is being investigated for multiple instances of sexual harassment — specifically for untoward advances toward women in the Huffington Post's Editorial Fellows program, which he managed.

"The focus of the investigation was Soni’s management of HuffPost’s Editorial Fellows program, which he allegedly treated as a continually-replenished pool of potential romantic partners," Gawker's J.K. Trotter reports. Soni apparently bragged about his intentions quite openly. One former staffer personally witnessed an exchange between Soni and several other editors after one of them pointed out that the latest class of fellows, which had been hand-picked by Soni, was made up of disproportionately white, blonde women."

Staffers also claimed that several fellows "received inappropriate Facebook messages and odd phone calls from Soni during and after work hours, asking when they could get together," according to the report.

The Huffington Post declined to address Trotter's inquiries about the investigation into Soni’s behavior, writing, “It’s our policy never to discuss personnel matters." In a separate email, Arianna Huffington told Trotter: “I have to reiterate what Lena said—that we don’t comment on personnel matters.”

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.