Reveal

Chelsea Goodrich and her mother, Lorraine, were locked in discussions with the director of the Mormon church’s risk management division, Paul Rytting. One of Rytting’s jobs is to protect the church from legal liability, including sexual abuse lawsuits.

The women had come to the meeting with one clear request: Would the church allow a local Idaho bishop who heard Chelsea’s father’s confession of abuse to testify against him ...

When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California wanted to purchase new firearms, it sold its used ones to help cover the cost. The old guns went to a distributor, which then turned around and sold them to the public. One of those guns—a Glock pistol—found its way to Indianapolis. 

That Glock was involved in the killing of Maria Leslie’s grandson, and the fact that it once belonged to law enforcement makes ...

On a summer night in 1995, a sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed in a hotel parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found no eyewitnesses and almost no evidence pointing to the shooter. 

Detectives ultimately zeroed in on a man named Toforest Johnson, who on that same night was with friends at a nightclub miles away. Johnson was tried twice for the murder and eventually convicted o...

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its 40 acres and a mule promise – and it has continued for decades. 

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation, and local governments across the country are finally asking: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how? 

This week on Reveal, we explore the renewed f...

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools and other amenities. 

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government and turned former co...

Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land – only to see it returned to their enslavers.

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-gr...

Many Lakota people agree it's imperative to revitalize their language, which has declined to fewer than 1,500 fluent speakers, according to some estimates. But how to do that is a matter of broader debate and a contentious legal battle. Should Lakota be codified and standardized to make learning it easier? Or should the language stay as it always has been, defined by many different ways of writing and speaking? The NPR pod...

For years, a Saudi-owned hay farm has been using massive amounts of water in the middle of the Arizona desert and exporting the hay back to Saudi Arabia. 

The farm’s water use has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story more than eight years ago.

Since then, the water crisis in the American West has only worsened as megafarms have taken hold there...

Bill and Nancy Rasweiler thought they were making a smart decision when they decided to lease their land to Shepherd’s Run, a large-scale solar project that promised a steady income and offered them a way to contribute to renewable energy efforts. But when they presented their plan to the town of Copake, New York, they were met with widespread backlash. 

“We never expected this kind of resistance,” Nancy Rasweiler recalled....

As any schoolkid might tell you, U.S. elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn't been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans and poor White people. The first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. This week’s sho...

In 2014, in the college town of Isla Vista, California, a 22-year-old man murdered six people and injured 14 others before killing himself. The killer didn’t suddenly “snap” one day out of the blue; he planned the attack and spiraled into crisis in the years leading up to it. 

The horrific incident left violence prevention experts wondering: What were the missed warning signs?

One person who held some of the answers was the ...

Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners. 

In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting. 

He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that nig...

Bruce Praet is a well-known name in law enforcement, especially across California. He co-founded a company called Lexipol that contracts with more than 95% of police departments in the state and offers its clients trainings and ready-made policies.

In one of Praet’s training webinars, posted online, he offers a piece of advice that policing experts have called inhumane. It’s aimed at protecting officers and their depart...

Around the globe, journalists, human rights activists, scholars and others are facing digital attacks from Pegasus, military-grade spyware originally developed to go after criminals. Some of the people targeted have been killed or are in prison.

In this episode, Reveal partners with the Shoot the Messenger podcast to investigate one of the biggest Pegasus hacks ever uncovered: the targeting of El Faro newspaper in El Salvad...

In November 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team. But he’d become impatient with pandemic restrictions, and his grandmother had just passed away from COVID-19.   

One night, Glenn and his mother got in a fight, and he left the house. The next day, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn ...

After six months of war in Gaza, the Palestinian medical infrastructure has collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of pregnant women without a safe place to deliver. Reporters Gabrielle Berbey and Salman Ahad Khan follow one mother over the final months of her pregnancy after she’s forced to leave behind her home, work and doctor in Gaza City. 

We begin with the reporters’ first call to Lubna Al Rayyes five weeks into the war...

As the war in Ukraine grinds into a third year, more Russian soldiers are attempting to escape frontline deployment, supported by an underground network of fellow Russians.

Associated Press investigative reporter Erika Kinetz follows the dramatic journey of one Russian military officer who deserted the army and fled Russia, guided by an anti-war group that has helped thousands of people evade military service or desert. T...

The first time Trina Edwards was locked in a psychiatric hospital for children, she was 12 years old. She was sure a foster parent would pick her up the next day. But instead, Trina would end up spending years cycling in and out of North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage, Alaska. 

At times, she was ready to be discharged, but Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services couldn’t find anywhere else to put her – so Trina would ...