A month and a half ago, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s devastating investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual predation lit a fuse within the media and entertainment industries, precipitating a deluge of claims from myriad outlets about the foul behavior of public figures ranging from Charlie Rose to Louis C.K. to Mark Halperin. Now, the conflagration has arrived back at the Times’s own doorstep. On Monday morning, Vox published a story with the headline, “Exclusive: N.Y.T. White House correspondent Glenn Thrush’s history of bad judgment around young women journalists,” which contained allegations of inappropriate groping and kissing by Thrush, one of America’s most prominent political reporters. The story detailed incidents depicting Thrush, who is 50 years old and married, making inappropriate advances upon women in their twenties, including some who were his colleagues during the time he worked at Politico. After some of these encounters, one source told Vox, Thrush told colleagues that the women had been the initiators. The story’s author, Vox editorial director Laura McGann, was not only a reporter probing the allegations; she herself had been on the receiving end of what she writes was an unwanted advance by Thrush when she was an editor at Politico. (I, too, used to work at Politico, where I overlapped with Thrush, who I've had a cordial relationship with, and McGann, who I do not know.)

After the story’s publication, the Times announced that it was investigating the matter, and Thrush was quickly suspended. Thrush, meanwhile, issued a statement apologizing to “any woman who felt uncomfortable in my presence, and for any situation where I behaved inappropriately.” He also disclosed that he was beginning outpatient treatment for an alcohol-abuse problem. “I am working hard to repair the damage I have done.” (I texted Thrush to see if he wanted to speak further, but didn’t get a response. His full statement circulated on Twitter.)

At the Times, known for occasionally obsessive self-reflection, the news prompted enormous anxiety. The news organization that fomented an extraordinary cultural upheaval was suddenly tasked with managing through it. The newsroom, like many others, is on edge. “People are feeling embarrassed, discouraged, and vulnerable,” said one veteran Times editor. The source pointed me to a tweet from a young female digital news editor, Maira Garcia, who wrote: “I’ll say this: I’m proud to work at The Times. I give so much of myself to it, as do so many other women who work there. They are an inspiration. But I can still feel angry, sad and disappointed. And I can also hope that we all come out better in the end.” Times management knows they’re in the spotlight. Executive editor Dean Baquet and C.E.O. Mark Thompson both sent staff memos addressing the matter. “The alleged behavior described in the piece is clearly not in keeping with the values we expect from Times employees,” Baquet wrote. “We plan a thorough investigation . . . and it’s critical that we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards of behavior.”

Precisely who, of the men who’ve committed these sorts of offenses, is deserving of a chance at redemption, is a question no one has yet answered—it’s a line that hasn’t been drawn. And given the Times’s importance in the story, Thrush's situation is liable to be a test case.

Among the multiple current and former Times employees I spoke with—including men and women, managers and subordinates—people were wrestling with whether the allegations against Thrush warranted his termination—a question perhaps complicated by the fact that most of the events occurred prior to his hiring, and did not involve any Times colleagues. For some, Thrush’s misdeeds were not of the same magnitude as those of, say, Halperin, a powerful political journalist who lost his TV gig and book deal after CNN exposed accusations of “pressing an erection against [women’s] bodies while he was clothed,” or Rose, a broadcast legend who was fired from CBS on Tuesday in the wake of a Washington Post report, and subsequent pieces from other outlets, alleging lewd and inappropriate behavior with young women who worked for him. “The Vox piece,” a male employee of the Times’ Washington bureau told me, “it was obviously a damning piece; I don’t think anyone would say it wasn’t. But it was also a piece that, like a lot of these things, lived in some gray areas. It’s not an easy call.“ Others agreed with the amorphousness. “To me,” said another one of my Times sources, a woman, “it makes a difference that [Thrush] wasn’t the boss or supervisor. That mitigates the degree of seriousness.” This person also said that high-level Times figures are “torn” about whether Thrush should keep his job. A third Times source said: “I honestly don’t think anyone in leadership feels like they can make a judgment until they understand, more fully, exactly what the behavior was.”

Random House, where Thrush and Maggie Haberman recently landed a significant book deal, was also still processing the news when I checked in with sources there on Monday. On Tuesday morning, a Random House spokeswoman emailed, “No update.” I texted Haberman, a longtime friend of Thrush’s and his close collaborator on many high-profile Times stories about the Trump administration, and she said, "The Times is investigating, and I need to refer you to them." A spokesperson for the Times declined to comment beyond the statements already issued.

There is, however, one thing everyone seems to agree on: the stakes could not be higher. Even though Thrush has only been with the Times for less than a year, he’s become one of the most high profile and recognizable figures on its politics team, and was even parodied in a White House briefing-room skit on Saturday Night Live. The allegations raise a number of questions concerning his ongoing effectiveness as a Times reporter: Could his personal behavior complicate his ability to cover a president with his own history of sexual allegations? Could it make him vulnerable combatting Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the briefing room?

The Times’s response, sources said, is also likely to be colored by the case of Michael Oreskes, who resigned from his post as NPR’s editorial director several weeks ago after the emergence of multiple sexual-harassment allegations, some of which occurred while he was the Times Washington bureau chief nearly two decades ago. After the Oreskes news broke, Times officials investigated those claims, including a call to former executive editor Joe Lelyveld, according to a person familiar with the matter, and verified that a complaint was never made against Oreskes at the Times. Nevertheless, this means that people will be watching how the Times deals with Thrush all the more closely.

The last six weeks have quite possibly been among the proudest of Baquet’s tenure, and will likely go down as a massive part of his legacy as the Times’s newsroom leader. Having been out front in the recent wave of sexual-harassment reporting, the Times can’t afford to make the wrong move when it comes to addressing reporting that has exposed one of its own. It's a different sort of challenge. “The journalism so far that the Times has produced on this subject, you’ve got to imagine that it’s Pulitzer worthy,” the veteran Times editor told me. “So how the Times responds in this situation, it’s being scrutinized. I cannot express more strongly how seriously the Times is viewing this.”