One of Europe’s biggest publishing houses made a €2mn payout to a top tabloid editor after he was fired following a string of sexual relationships with junior staff, a Berlin court heard amid an escalating dispute between him and his former bosses.
Axel Springer, the German media giant that is partly owned by the US private equity firm KKR, awarded the seven-figure severance payment to Bild editor Julian Reichelt when he was pushed out of the powerful right-of-centre newspaper under a cloud in 2021.
He had faced a raft of accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power for sleeping with interns and subordinates that he denies, although he does not dispute having relationships with younger staff.
Details of the payout were revealed as a bitter dispute between Reichelt and Axel Springer, which also owns the US outlets Politico and Insider as well as German broadsheet Die Welt, reached court on Friday, underlining how the fallout from the Reichelt saga has continued to reverberate almost two years after his departure.
Reichelt, now 42, stepped aside from his job running Germany’s most powerful tabloid in March 2021 but was reinstated after a compliance investigation conducted by law firm Freshfields examining whether he had abused his power cleared him of graver wrongdoing. The probe did find evidence of power abuse but did not find evidence of sexual harassment.
He was fired seven months later after The New York Times revealed details of the probe. Axel Springer said that “new findings” had showed that Reichelt had “failed to maintain a clear boundary between private and professional matters” and had been “untruthful” about this to the company’s executive board.
A person familiar with the decision to fire Reichelt said that the company under German labour law had no choice but to make the large payout, given that the compliance investigation had not found any sackable offence.
Under German employment rules, the size of severance packages are defined by an employee’s remuneration and their tenure. Reichelt had been a Bild employee for two decades.
Axel Springer has launched a legal battle in a bid to secure the return of its severance payment to Reichelt after accusing him of sharing confidential internal data with a rival outlet.
Lawyers for the company told a Berlin labour court in an initial hearing on Friday that they were also seeking a contractual penalty of €192,000 for breach of contract for failing to destroy confidential information that they say he had agreed to delete.
He is also accused of poaching employees.
Reichelt’s lawyer Stephan Kötter told the court that he denied the accusations against him. While he conceded that the former editor approached Holger Friedrich, the owner of the broadsheet Berliner Zeitung, he said that it was to share private conversations between him and a woman who was one of his main accusers that raised doubts about the credibility of her account.
Lawyers for Reichelt, who was not present for the hearing, argue that he had in fact been urged by Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner to keep and share that material because it could help exonerate him — and accused his former employers of pursuing the civil and criminal complaints purely to “intimidate and damage the reputation of Julian Reichelt”. A lawyer for Axel Springer rejected the arguments in court.
The next hearing is scheduled for November.
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