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.

Mirkinson, who had been at the office night and day covering the racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, was home sleeping when Taibi’s story was published; he was not even aware of its publication. (Emami had edited the piece in his absence.) Nevertheless, when Mirkinson woke up and checked his e-mail, he found a stream of angry messages from HuffPost higher-ups asking why the Zakaria article had been published. When Mirkinson got back to the office, Kate Palmer, the Huffington Post’s managing editor, came looking for him.

According to one former insider, Huffington wanted both Taibi and Emami suspended for 10 days, on the grounds that they had failed to call Zakaria for a comment, even though that was not standard practice for an “aggregated” story—that is, one without any fresh reporting, gathered from reliable news organizations across the Web. And while Taibi’s post had failed to include Zakaria’s most recent public denial of the allegations, that was a shortcoming that could be easily fixed by appending a note to the piece later—and less than eight hours later, the HuffPost editors did just that.

Mirkinson argued to reduce his colleagues’ suspensions, but was told that 10 days was already a compromise. After employees in the legal and human-resources departments of AOL became involved, however, the suspension was reduced to three days, with pay. Emami “was then raked over the coals for doing what she thought it was her job to do,” this former insider recalls. (“Our handling of the story had to do with the fact that it violated a cardinal rule in the newsroom: to always seek a comment from a subject about whom a negative article is being written,” Huffington e-mailed me. Suspensions were justified, she wrote, in order “to reinforce editorial standards important in the newsroom.”)

Nevertheless, the effects of Zakaria-gate were apparently felt for months to come. Mirkinson left the Huffington Post soon afterward; he wrote a column at Salon and now works at Fusion. Taibi left too and is now a social-media editor at Bloomberg. In February 2015, Emami joined New York magazine as a senior editor at its Vulture.com Web site. (Mirkinson, Taibi, and Emami each declined to comment.)

“I think it really speaks to a broader point about Arianna,” explains one person involved, “which is that when powerful people [she knows] get angry about something, it is by no means a guarantee that she will defend her staff. . . . Instead, what happens is often she will forward an e-mail from someone angry about something and she’ll say, ‘Explain this.’” (“I get emails with complaints all the time,” Huffington e-mailed me in response, “some from well-known people and some from people I don’t know.” She continued: “I have never interfered to protect a friend—or an advertiser, for that matter—if the story was accurately reported.”) But she did intervene on Zakaria’s behalf.

This August, Huffington resigned as the editor in chief of the Huffington Post to focus on her new endeavor, Thrive Global, a brand devoted to wellness and disconnecting from the tech-and-media-obsessed landscape that Huffington herself helped create. Huffington’s accomplishments during her decade-long tenure as editor are impressive. The news organization, which had been planned as a liberal antidote to the Drudge Report in the wake of John Kerry’s presidential loss to George W. Bush, in 2004, is now the 154th most popular Web site in the world. It has published the work of successful journalists, such as Tim O’Brien, Tom Zeller, Peter Goodman, and Lisa Belkin. In 2012, it won a Pulitzer Prize for David Wood’s 10-part series about life after war for America’s soldiers.

What Huffington lacked in journalistic experience she compensated for with an almost preternatural capacity for marketing and promotion, coupled with an innate understanding about the possibilities of the Web. Huffington seemed to understand earlier than most that the Internet placed a high value on personal and personality-based writing, and that audiences were looking for content that spoke to their interests and didn’t exactly mind if that content seemed slanted. (In fact, as the subsequent rise of Breitbart, among other niche sites, suggests, they often preferred it that way.) Huffington also realized that many of the people in her network were searching for a venue for their own musings, which might not all measure up to the same standard of quality, but provided a veritable buzz machine.

Huffington says that a new round of financing for Thrive Global triggered her departure from the Huffington Post—that she could no longer run both organizations and that both “deserved a full-time, undistracted leader.” But by the time of the Verizon deal, in May 2015, she appeared to be losing support from within her own newsroom. Some reporters and editors accused her of sacrificing the site’s journalistic standards to accommodate her friends and agenda. “The ultimate priority at HuffPost is making the dictator look good,” noted an anonymous Gawker piece that June. When someone from Huffington’s personal network complained about an unflattering picture or an unfavorable article, “Arianna usually sides with her friends,” the writer continued. “Work at HuffPost for a little while and you’ll soon learn which people—Bill Maher, or Mika Brzezinski, or the Dalai Lama, to name just a few—need to be treated delicately.”

The Dalai Lama, as The Washington Post has noted, enjoyed sacred status in the HuffPost newsroom, not just as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, but also as somebody Huffington particularly admired. In the fall of 2014, the athletic-apparel company Lululemon had entered into a partnership with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Lululemon agreed to contribute $750,000 over three years to the Dalai Lama Center for, among other things, researching the connection between the mind, body, and heart.

The alliance lit up the Internet. Lululemon had recently found itself backtracking from some insensitive comments made by its founder, Chip Wilson, about the physical shape of its ideal female customers. A blog on the Lululemon Web site attracted a swarm of comments, many of them about how Lululemon was trying to improve its image by “piggybacking” on the Dalai Lama’s reputation.

The task fell to Kim Bhasin, the Huffington Post’s senior retail editor, to aggregate the strands of the story into a post. “We knew that there was a potential land mine, because Arianna has a thing for the Dalai Lama,” explained one former editor. “So we were extremely careful.” (Huffington says the notion that the Dalai Lama is a personal friend is “extremely flattering but untrue.”) To be safe, the editors decided not to quote any of the negative blog comments in Bhasin’s story, which they might have otherwise done. “We were just going to paraphrase,” the former editor says.

In addition, several requests for comment were made to the Dalai Lama Center. “So we do all that,” the former editor continues. “We feel like we scrub it down to a gentle nub, not really criticizing Lululemon, just saying, ‘Hey, can you believe Lululemon stepped on its own rake again?’ You know, scrub it down, make it as innocuous as possible.”

After waiting for a response from the Dalai Lama Center, Bhasin’s story was posted on the Huffington Post’s home page, on October 25, 2014, a Saturday morning. “Nobody has any problems with it,” the former Huffington Post editor recalls. The next weekend, Huffington and the Dalai Lama were both featured speakers at a meditation symposium in Boston. Early the following week, Katie Nelson, the national editor, showed up at the desk of Mark Gongloff, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was then running the site’s business and technology section. Nelson was “in a panic and says Arianna is on the war path,” remembers the former editor, who was at the HuffPost throughout the whole Dalai Lama dustup. “Arianna lost her shit,” this person recalls. “She said, ‘Oh, this is atrocious. I can’t believe they’re calling the Dalai Lama greedy.’”

Various phone calls and meetings ensued. Whitney Snyder, the home-page editor, was critical of Bhasin’s story after Huffington blew up, according to the former editor. “He said, ‘This is problematic, we can’t just be anonymously quoting like that!’ There were no direct quotes, but [he said] ‘We just can’t be giving people’”—a reference to the anonymous people whose opinions they had paraphrased from the Lululemon Web site—“‘a platform to say things like this.’” Bhasin’s article was amended to include a note stating that the story had “been revised throughout . . . to remove anonymous quotations sourced from the Lululemon website.”

But Huffington was not satisfied with simply changing the article. According to the former editor, Huffington wanted to fire Bhasin, Gongloff, and Kurt Heine, the news editor who edited the piece. In a conference call, the top editors at the Huffington Post, including John Montorio, Nelson, and Snyder, talked Huffington out of firing the three journalists. Instead, she instructed them to decide on an appropriate punishment for the infraction.

When Montorio came in the next morning, he handed down the verdict: all three would be suspended for one day, with pay. Others in the newsroom were stunned, says the former editor, who describes the scene as if “a nuclear bomb” had been detonated. “People don’t get suspended in newsrooms unless they plagiarize or punch an editor or whatever, you know?”

Reached last month, one person with knowledge of the incident says “it was just a catastrophic mistake” that the three were suspended, “but that being said . . . it wasn’t the easiest piece to defend, playing up these online comments.” (For her part, Huffington defends the suspensions. “The story on the Dalai Lama Center,” she e-mailed me, “violated another cardinal newsroom rule, by being entirely based on anonymous comments posted on the internet.” More broadly, Huffington maintained that “there has never been a different dynamic about how my friends were written about on HuffPost. And of course, countless articles have appeared critical of friends of mine.”)

As with the Zakaria incident, the Dalai Lama episode would have a considerable ripple effect. Gongloff is now an editor at Bloomberg Gadfly; Bhasin covers retail for Bloomberg News. (Gongloff declined to comment and Bhasin could not be reached for comment.) “In general, if you do things like that, people will get the message,” a former insider at the site told me. “It creates the opposite of what a newsroom should be, which is that you feel like you can pursue the story wherever it goes and whomever it’s about.”

Covering companies to which Huffington had a personal connection was also a dicey proposition. After Huffington delivered a speech at a Walmart function, one source familiar with the matter told me, a Walmart board member complained. “It was a constant struggle to do Walmart stories there,” says the former editor. (Huffington says she never gave a paid speech to Walmart and has never been contacted by a Walmart board member. She then cited a dozen critical Huffington Post stories about the company.)

But in a May 2013 story idea meeting, Ryan Grim, the HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief, said that Emran Hossain had been doing a great job covering the garment-factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people. Someone wondered aloud if Walmart purchased clothing made in the sweatshop. Grim said his team was investigating which companies the sweatshop was supplying. According to contemporaneous notes of the meeting, Huffington “stressed that, given the sensitivities with WalMart, we need to be absolutely sure about any WalMart connection before moving ahead.” (It turned out that Walmart did not have any goods manufactured in the factory.)

Then there was Uber. Huffington was known to be friendly with Travis Kalanick, the company’s co-founder and C.E.O. A former editor tells me that Huffington Post journalists followed an unwritten policy of not publishing Kalanick’s tweets, which were often newsworthy and provocative. “That was the level of obsession with some of these friends of Arianna,” says the former editor. “Everyone was terrified and lived in fear.” Last April, Huffington joined Uber’s board. (Huffington maintains that she never intervened to stop any Uber story—she sent along links to 11 pieces that ran—and says, “I have to confess (sorry Travis) that I do not even follow him on Twitter.”)

One Huffington Post writer told me it was difficult enough just doing serious journalism without having to deal with Huffington’s idiosyncrasies. “It can be pretty painful on its own,” he said of being a reporter, “and it really makes it extra hard when at the end of the day, after all the effort is put into the story, then you have to deal with her and her sort of non-journalistic ideals, like using her personal beliefs to pressure you into compromising your integrity. That is just a downer. It just sucked.” But Montorio, who worked at The New York Times, Newsday, and The Washington Star before the Huffington Post, told me that Huffington was no more “off the wall” than other top editors for whom he has worked. “Leadership is tough,” he says. “It’s tough to be sitting at the top of the newsroom. You’re never going to make everyone happy. You’re probably not going to make many people happy at all.”

The tension between good journalism and excessive corner-office control came to a boil when Jason Cherkis, a skilled investigative reporter, spent a year reporting and writing an article for HuffPost about the treatment of heroin addiction in northern Kentucky. The subject had a lot of potential to become personal for Huffington. Her daughter, Christina, is a recovering cocaine addict, who has written about her addiction in Glamour and discussed it on the Today show. Christina recovered using the 12-step abstinence process that is a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar addiction-relief programs.

Cherkis’s piece, “Dying to Be Free,” published in January 2015, revealed that, while total abstinence can sometimes be effective, the consequences can be fatal if the addict relapses. By contrast, Cherkis reported, drugs such as Suboxone, which block the craving for heroin, give addicts a chance to “right the ship” and get other aspects of their lives back in order before moving forward to the goal of going totally drug-free. The question that Cherkis’s investigation posed was why the 12-step program was still so prevalent in the face of the success of Suboxone.

Ryan Grim edited Cherkis’s piece, along with Montorio. While Huffington was aware of their work, one former editor remembers, she left them alone until the story hit the copy desk, nearly the final stop on the road to publication. The first draft was about 21,000 words. “She read it and lost her mind, because it criticized 12-step programs,” recalls the former editor. “And she put a screeching halt to it.” She handed the article over to a different editor, who removed many of the references that questioned the effectiveness of abstinence.

Cherkis felt that the re-editing compromised the accuracy of the article. Grim remained involved throughout the whole process, he says, and after considerable struggle Cherkis and Grimm were eventually able to get the piece published in a form that satisfied Cherkis, and won considerable acclaim. But during three months of wrangling over the article’s final form, Cherkis “was seething about it,” recalls the former editor. (Cherkis declined to comment.)

Huffington says there was a lot of healthy “editorial back-and-forth and heated discussions” and that it was her job as editor in chief to insist that parts of Cherkis’s story be “more rigorously reported.” But, she adds, “it was never dictating from the top.” Her experience with her daughter, “who has dealt with drug addiction and has now been sober for four and a half years,” she writes, “only meant that I had studied the subject of addiction very deeply, and wanted to make sure that the piece . . . reflected all the latest science on the subject.” She adds that Cherkis’s piece won a Polk Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Grim and Montorio agree that Huffington’s intervention did ultimately strengthen the article.

“I actually really do believe that she cares about journalism,” says Tom Zeller, who worked for two years as a reporter at the Huffington Post, referring to his old boss. “She just is probably not quite hip to what it takes to produce the best stuff. The best stuff does happen at the Huffington Post, but you really have to push for it and it needs to perform, and if it doesn’t, then it might get the axe.” (Zeller, a former New York Times environmental reporter, left the Huffington Post in 2013.)

Huffington’s own history as an author did not help her standing in the newsroom. She was accused of plagiarizing sections of her 1981 biography of opera diva Maria Callas; the matter was resolved out of court by paying Callas’s biographer Gerald Fitzgerald a settlement, which Huffington has described as being “in the low five figures.” Her 1988 Picasso biography also provoked a plagiarism complaint, from a respected art historian who told Vanity Fair, in 1994, “What she did was steal 20 years of my work.” In both instances, Huffington has denied the allegations.

In a February 2011 Vanity Fair piece, I explored a lawsuit against Huffington brought by Democratic political consultants__ Peter Daou__ and James Boyce, who claimed that Huffington stole their idea for creating a “liberal Drudge,” after a December 3, 2004, meeting at her Brentwood home—generally considered the foundational meeting of the site—that included such liberal stalwarts as Larry and Laurie David (then still married), David Geffen, and Norman Lear, among some 30 participants. Daou and Boyce claimed in their court filings that after they described the details of their idea for what became the Huffington Post at that meeting, and in subsequent follow-up communications, Ken Lerer, Huffington, and Jonah Peretti, the site’s three co-founders, essentially cut them out of further planning.

Huffington and her public-relations team denied that the claims of Daou and Boyce had any merit. Huffington portrayed them as delusional. “We have now officially entered into Bizzaro World,” she and Lerer wrote in a statement released to Politico after the lawsuit was filed. “Boyce and Daou’s claims are pure fantasy.”

Fantasy or not, AOL, which assumed liability for the lawsuit after it bought the Huffington Post, quietly settled with Boyce and Daou in May 2014, paying them a rumored total of around $10 million. Huffington supposedly started crying and apologizing in the judge’s office when he directed the parties to reach a settlement. Contacted two years after the settlement, Boyce would say only, “I firmly believe the truth in the end always comes out.” (Huffington would not comment on the amount of the settlement and said the idea that she cried in the judge’s office was “wrong.”)

Despite any lingering questions about the source of the original idea, it was Arianna Huffington who had the will and stamina and vision to turn the Huffington Post into a model for the brave new world of fast media and free content. But as the Huffington Post grew, its journalism wasn’t the only issue. Huffington was never quite able to follow through on making the money that she said the Huffington Post was going to generate—which will be the subject of the next piece in this series.

[UPDATE: This story includes a clarification from Ryan Grim about his role in editing "Dying to Be Free."]