Going public for getting fired — worth it? Or worthless? Part I: Who’s going to tell my story?
- Oct 16, 2025
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 30, 2025
What’s my vote, on the scandal?
While “All the cool girls get fired,” may be the phrase of the moment, not much has been cool about this: going public after a public termination, owning multiple mistakes, and boldly recognizing that no employer is perfect — that’s not a welcome or well-understood response for someone who messed up.
I knew it would further hurt my career and reputation in many ways. That was inescapable. However, the process I went through has helped me heal. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
You want to know if going on the record still looks good from this side of the affair. Do I regret it? That’s the question friend/reporters have been asking. So before this topic gets put to bed, God willing, I’m going to explain why it matters enough to warrant the mess that has resulted. If you don’t understand after all this… that’s okay. It’s not your story.
In act two, I bring the focus back to here and now, giving you my thoughts on the coverage of this incident by a local newspaper and podcasters, too. No surprise that it was pretty awful to live through and my faith in reporting was shaken.
But was my faith in this profession and industry destroyed by the harsh realities of the last few months? 🤷🏻♀️
I’ll let you know in the second part of this piece. I am writing my way to the end. I’m in it now.
Write or die.
By: Audrey Korte
Oct. 13 — interrupted again by hackers. Picked back up Oct. 16.
Going public for getting fired — worth it? Or worthless?
Part I: ‘Nobody’s gonna tell my story’ — why it matters to me
The moment I realized it mattered — having other people know the truth, and share the truth about who you are and what you stood for — was a long time ago. It’s been years since I thought about that experience. Lately it’s showing up in dreams and rambling thoughts frequently.
I didn’t want to go there. To remember it so fully but it arrived with a suitcase, here to stay for a minute at least.
What you did, who you were and what you lived through means more than everything else for someone like me.
About a decade ago I sat in a hospital bed in a room at the end of the hall of Newport’s public hospital in R.I. The part of the building where they put the patients who are disruptive: screaming the loudest, or weeping and wailing — making a big ordeal out of their personal pain and misery.
A man who thought he was God’s gift to medicine, you know the type — a surgeon who thought he knew everything — stood at the foot of my bed impatiently explaining that he had run all the tests, looked at all the labs and there was nothing wrong with me.
He also shook his finger at me. Literally.
“Stop it. Stop crying. You are being ridiculous,” he told me.
Of course, I wasn’t. We know now what was wrong but no thanks to that guy.
I’ll point out that this was the 11th time since 2003 I had been told in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with me physically. Which is not the same as saying we can’t figure out what is wrong. One implies getting better is on you. The other? That the responsibility is on them.
I was in hour 14 of the worst pain I have experienced before or since, looking at this guy with hope that he had answers and a plan. I expected it was surgical, whatever was wrong. I was a couple days post-op already, having had my gallbladder removed days earlier. After that surgery I was feeling decent at first, grateful that the symptoms that had become debilitating in previous weeks were now addressed and I could start living again.
Twenty hours after being discharged I was standing in the bathroom brushing my teeth before bed when a wave of searing pain started in my gut. Before long I was waking up my uncle saying call an ambulance — feeling with complete certainty that this was life-threatening. It was too sudden, too severe, ten times what it hurt like pre-surgery. I was afraid I would faint or fall down dead then and there.
Who’s in charge? Meet Dr. Douchy
Now, a day later the doctor, let’s call him — Douchy Howser — is meeting me for the first time. He’s angry, fed up with listening to me. I mean, he had been on the floor for a full 20 minutes I was crying. Poor guy.
He said in no uncertain terms I was wasting their time.
I was in agony. My body shuddering like a kid at the end of a big meltdown. I wasn’t screaming at the moment — but losing my voice. I was begging, saying things like: please listen to me, I’m not making it up, something is very wrong, run the tests again.
Five hours later I was declining. I could feel it. Death was here taking a look around, deciding its next move.
A psychiatrist walked in.
The surgeon had sent him.
I had to answer questions about PTSD and traumas for 90 mins while he evaluated me to decide if I belonged on the psych ward.
I told him I was happy to answer the questions and didn’t care where he put me in the hospital as long as they ran the tests again.
I was devestated and in pain, trying to convince these men I needed medical attention.
The surgeon walked in again sometime later while my favorite nurse, a redhead whose name I don’t recall, was checking on me. She knew her stuff and was paying close attention to the situation, I could tell.
She was checking my vitals. The doctor was staring at me. Both of them were facing me but she was bedside, he was at the entrance to the room. I could see both their faces but he couldn’t see hers.
He said: “You need to go home.”
And I watched this nurse’s face change —- Hollywood special effects couldn’t have demonstrated the shift in mood and intention better than nature did in that instance. She was not the bubbly, empathetic, friendly-face now. She was a woman on a mission.
She turned as if trying to control herself and looked at him and said:
‘Doctor — I know you are in charge. I have tended to Audrey for hours, spoken to the nurses on duty and not one of us thinks this is in her head. Her behavior does not indicate anything but genuine pain. She burst the blood vessels in her face from screaming. She has not asked for medication. She’s demanded urgency, asked for answers and looked for our help.’
‘If you send her home I will stand against you. Formally. And make a big deal about it. She needs your help — I’m sure of it.’
He was furious. Stormed from the room. She doubled-down. I could hear her rounding up the troops all day, letting her allied nurses know she was ready to fight for me and convincing them it was the right call.
That was the last interaction I had with Douchy.
Easter Sunday: The moment I prayed for someone to tell my story
Somehow I stayed. Someone re-ordered all the tests and added a new one. Something atypical though I don’t recall what it was specifically just that it required older machinery not often used and located in the basement of the building. The guy who wheeled me room to room for imaging explained how the machine was far better, more accurate but made a lot of noise and was quite old by then. I understood that they still used it because it did some things better than your newer machines. That’s what I took away at the time anyway.
So they put me in tubes. And they put more tubes in me. I hoped it wouldn’t be my last adventure on earth. ‘Cause it sorta sucked as a last hoorah.
Around 4 a.m. the next morning I was answerless, still in pain, waiting for the morphine to hit and take the edge off the knife in my gut. I was quiet, listening to the clock tick, having a “come to Jesus” moment. Literally and figuratively. Something that had been a bit of an outlandish fear 24 hours earlier was actually happening — I knew it in my soul. With a certainty unlike anything I have ever known.
I was dying.
It was Easter Sunday.
I was praying. Deal-making. Telling God what mattered most, asking for favors. I prayed that I wouldn’t die until after Easter. It would make the holiday too sad for my family later on. I prayed that after my death they would do an autopsy and find out what had happened — get some answers, and tell my family and Douchy Howser, what had been overlooked, what killed me.
I half expected they would open me up and find some surgical instrument had been left behind during the surgery two days prior. It just hurt so bad.
And I prayed nobody would sweep it under the rug — my parents, brother, friends deserved answers. And I deserved for everyone to know I was telling the truth. I was not making it up.
I then prayed God would guide them through the aftermath — I hoped my family would sue the hospital and win a settlement to cover their needs for the rest of their lives.
That’s a prayer that tells you a lot about who I am. And what matters most to me. But here’s another piece of this. I realized something about what I wanted out of life that day.
Before I stopped praying I got emotional when I thought to myself: What if they have no answers? What if the truth gets buried? And I had a moment of surprise when I realized I was about to die without a witness to what was real and true.
Nobody’s going to know the truth. Who’s going to tell my story?
That question and the moment I was in has stuck with me since. When I survived the affair I realized I hated my story so far: one of chronic illness and captivity, of surviving sexual assault, of failing to do anything impressive with my life, of being stuck.
I was a nobody. And I hated it. I wanted stories that ended in triumph. I wanted to make it. I wanted to be the comeback kid.
But that one question to God, to the universe sits here still lingering in the air. If this is the end who’s going to care about me after I’m gone. Who’s going to know who I was, how I think, what I was capable of? Who’s going to know Audrey? And tell her story?
And that question has informed my work every day since. I know what it is to be the person who hears your story and to be trusted with that. I am greatly sorry that I messed up with a story earlier this year because I understand how important it is to have someone trustworthy guard your narrative. I don’t take it lightly.
While not the point of this story, in the end they wheeled me in for emergency surgery around 4:30 p.m. on Easter. The surgeon who I normally worked with left Easter Sunday celebrations to come do the work himself having heard about the fiasco with Douchy Howser who was covering his service that weekend. Whatever popped on the second round of tests showed that I needed immediate aid.
In the end they pulled 16 stones from my bile duct. They had been left behind in the gallbladder surgery and were moving into and shredding my pancreas.
He said it hurt to operate on me. The damage was so severe.
From patient to journalist: A decade of finding my voice
Since then my life has gone in a number of directions. I had a lot of healing to do over life with Lyme. I had a lot of bad coping mechanisms for my illness — shame and pain. I needed to unravel these and face the world with a clear mind and deal with reality.
Took awhile. Let’s just say.
But I was capable, physically and neurologically, over those years, of helping myself do some things I had been missing out on while at the worst of my sickness. I put down some bad habits and walked away from some unhealthy situations and discovered who Audrey is versus who I was. I started thinking about who I could be. I intentionally distanced myself from being my disease, from letting it define me, identify me, become my lede.
Cut to 2025 and here I am picking up the pieces in the aftermath of becoming a news story. Being a news story does not necessitate ownership though. You can be the butt of it — not included, not heard, just talked around and about.
I never expected to become the story. I didn’t want it.
As a journalist, you learn to stay behind the scenes. You ask the questions, gather the facts, write the narrative but you’re not supposed to be the topic of discussion. Especially not like this.
When I became the story I never wanted to be
Last Friday, I sat in my sweatpants and NPR t-shirt working on this post. It was the third time that week I had put in a handful of hours to writing. I had some account security issues Tuesday that got a bit heated. Went on for two days straight. Since I was hacked the second week of September paying attention to and responding to security alerts has become a substantial time-suck.
But it’s more than that, it’s a huge stressor.
Tonight, Oct. 16 I have just concluded three days of the most stressful and personal-feeling parts of this hack.
I won’t say more. It’s not safe at this point. But it’s wrecking me, destroying me. Something as simple as an email from Google asking if I just logged in or if I changed my password can elicit panic for one simple reason: my answer to that question is “no” far too often.
And that has to be part of the discussion. Being the story, being front page news for not understanding AI or how new technology works has made me more of a target. I’m sure of it.
Six weeks of hacking: The cost of going public
As you know, in August 2025, I was fired from the Wisconsin State Journal after publishing a story that included AI-generated errors — hallucinations, as they’re called. I hadn’t been trained in using AI and did not know what AI hallucinations were.
I made mistakes. And I paid the price.
But what followed was as bad as losing my job — six weeks now of hackers interrupting and corrupting my life, accounts and security. Together the two have consumed me. Within hours of launching my blog which would begin with a post and public statement explaining some of the story, I was hacked. My accounts were breached. My digital life was invaded.
I wasn’t rewarded by the universe. It seemed I was being punished twice-over.
Oversharing online can be dangerous, and I learned that the hard way. The vulnerability of telling the truth publicly — especially when that truth is messy and humiliating — comes with real risks.
Yet, I don’t regret this.
Why I don’t regret it: When journalism shows up
Because in the middle of all that chaos, something remarkable happened: journalism showed up. I thought it was long gone from my life, along with the newsroom that fired me and went silent.
Reporting happened here. Inclusive reporting — the kind that included me instead of working around me.
Not that I liked being the news. The whole thing is wretched but the work of a few outlets reminded me what this profession can offer others. Not just the customers and the subscribers but the people under fire, the accused. The subject of the story.
We matter too.
Everyone deserves to be heard and to own their part of a story. I may not have envisioned this when I lay dying but being heard, being given a chance to explain in full — that is one of the most sacred duties that journalism can offer people — to witness, to question, to write it down and keep it safe. I have owned this because it is a part of my story and as long as I am alive I deserve to play a hand in my own narrative. I deserve to be able to tall my story.
And so do you.
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