Jessica Bennett is an author and award-winning journalist at The New York Times who has spent her career writing with a gimlet eye toward gender, sexuality and culture — from pop politics to the ripple effects of #MeToo. She was the first-ever gender editor of The Times, where she remains a contributing editor and writer, most recently penning the viral piece, “The Audacity of E Jean Carroll,” after covering her sexual assault and defamation trials against Donald Trump. She is an adjunct professor of magazine and digital journalism at New York University, and is the author of two bestselling books: Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace and This Is 18: Girls’ Lives Through Girls’ Eyes.
As a writer, Jessica has profiled and shaped our understanding of some of the world’s most complicated and maligned figures, starting with Monica Lewinsky. She has written on callout culture, the academic study of masculinity, and chronicled the colorful battle for the soul Miss America, which was trying to “modernize” for the current era. She prides herself in being able to cover, with far-reaching precision, both the intensely serious and the lighthearted. She spent months investigating sexual assault allegations against the playwright Israel Horovitz in the wake of The Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of Harvey Weinstein, but has also written about the politics of lip gloss, her resting bitch face, and the absurdities of modern hyperbole. She recently spent a year following three 13-year-old girls over the course of their 8th grade year, to understand the mental health struggles that come with being glued to a cell phone.
As an editor, Jessica has curated photography collections, produced docu-shorts and ad campaigns, and launched multimedia initiatives, from newsletters to podcasts. She was coeditor of the Overlooked Obituaries project, a massive campaign by The Times to provide long overdue obituaries for women who never received them (but should have), and was the editor of "This is 18," an immersive look at the lives of teen girls around the world, which became a traveling photo exhibit and a bestselling book. She partnered with Modern Love to depict the enduring complexities of sexual consent on college campuses, and was editor of The Primal Scream, an immersive look at the plight of working moms in the pandemic — in words, pictures and sound.
Jessica began her career at Newsweek, where she received GLAAD awards for her coverage of LGBTQ seniors and the fight for gay marriage, and the Nelly Bly award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for her series on a young woman whose gruesome death photos were leaked — and spread online — by the California highway patrol. She embedded with a group of modern-day survivalists, profiled and produced a short documentary about a polyamory enclave in her hometown, and chronicled the fight for marijuana legalization in California. With two colleagues, she documented the story of 46 women who sued Newsweek for gender discrimination in 1970 — which became a book, and later a TV series called Good Girls Revolt.
Jessica speaks on journalism and women’s issues around the world, and her work has been honored by the NY Press Club and the International Center for Photography, among other organizations. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU, where she teaches a class she created called “Reporting the Zeitgeist,” and likes to shock her students by telling them she once worked for Tumblr. You can find her on Substack, co-hosting the podcast “In Retrospect” for iHeartRadio or bumming around Brooklyn (and sometimes Yucca Valley) with her spouse and dog. She grew up in Seattle.
Some Facts About Me:
I have an honorary degree from the nation’s first pot university
I was the first and last and only gender editor of the New York Times, which was just like being a regular editor, but angrier
I have gone truly viral exactly once, for accidentally making the #PussyGrabsBack meme
I once watched Hillary Clinton debate Donald Trump with her childhood best friends
I created a primal scream hotline for working moms in the pandemic. It made me never want to have children.
I have found myself in many odd places as a reporter, but one of my favorite ones was Pamela Anderson’s attic
I used to curate a feminist stock photo collection with Getty Images
My first journalism job was as a reporter on the overnight crime beat at The Boston Globe
For a while, my photo was THE photo in the Wikipedia entry for “resting bitch face”
Speaking Agent
Wes Neff | Leigh Bureau
Literary Agent
Claudia Ballard | WME
Other Inquiries:
hi(at)jessicabennett(dot)com