In the first story in an ongoing series by Hell Gate and New York Focus on the systemic sexual assault of incarcerated people by employees in New York prisons, Jessy Edwards reported on the case of Sierra Johnson, a Native American woman who filed a lawsuit claiming she was sexually assaulted by three corrections officers and a doctor in New ...
In 1996, 36-year-old Susan Walsh reportedly left her house in Nutley, New Jersey, and was never seen again. The freelance writer, mother and sex worker is presumed dead, but her body has never been found. Her disappearances made headlines worldwide. In 2020, the mysterious case – and the misogyny in the original reporting about it and sexist remarks from the ...
With a seed grant from the Fund, Elyse Hauser obtained government records about deep-sea mining for minerals that can be used to make batteries, ballistics and other items. The records show that under President Joe Biden, some U.S. officials were supportive of deep-sea mining – and that support has expanded with an executive order signed by President Donal Trump, encouraging ...
In “The Adoption Trap,” freelance journalist Sandy West took a deep look at private foster and adoption agencies operating in Texas with little regulation or oversight from state child welfare authorities. With support from the Fund, West focused on two women locked in court battles to maintain their parental rights in lawsuits filed by people to whom neither they nor ...
As part of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project’s ongoing coverage of gaps in support for survivors of domestic violence and lackluster law-enforcement response in some cases, Eric Peterson and Sydnee Chapman reported on the case of a man who allegedly attacked his girlfriend and kidnapped her children – after Utah prosecutors had dropped charges against him in a 2022 domestic-violence ...
Journalist Rebecca Grant’s new book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the 60-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom, from Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press, charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban abortion. With support from the Fund, Grant investigated how, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, ...
For Rolling Stone, Antonia Juhasz traveled through rural Louisiana and New Orleans to talk to local community members about how President Donald Trump’s tax bill would gut funding for environmental work – and how that would impact people’s lives. An EPA employee told her that the result will surely be that more people get sick and die. With support from ...
Brightline, the nation’s only privately owned city-to-city passenger train, has failed to implement basic safety measures – and 182 people have died on the railway in the last eight years, according to an investigation by WLRN (the NPR member station in South Florida) and the Miami Herald, with support from the Fund. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, ...
The second season of Katie Thornton’s podcast, “The Divided Dial” recently aired on WNYC’s “On the Media” and NPR stations nationwide, digging into the history of shortwave radio propaganda and how it became a recruiting tool for militias and laid the groundwork for right-wing use of the internet and podcasts. The Fund supported the first season of the podcast, which ...
An investigation by Streetlight, a nonprofit news outlet based in Oklahoma City, found that most information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on facilities under its oversight excluded data on Black residents who live within one mile of factories, Superfund sites and other toxic sites. This omission affected a majority-Black neighborhood in Oklahoma City that has fought for better environmental ...