Reveal

Reveal’s American Rehab exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.

In Episode 1, we meet Penny Rawlings, who is relieved to get her brother into drug rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem.

The Trump years have seen an increase in domestic terrorist attacks linked by hateful ideologies that thrive online. Reveal teams up with Type Investigations to track every domestic terror incident from 2016 through 2019. We unpack the ideologies and tactics of American white supremacists and assess government attempts to combat them.

Despite revelations of clergy sex abuse and promises of transparency, a prominent Jesuit university is doing little to punish priests who cross the line. 

In this follow-up investigation about the Jesuit order in the Pacific Northwest, reporter Emily Schwing has two stories about Gonzaga University, which among Jesuit schools has the highest number of predatory priests who worked as staff and faculty. The first story takes us to a remote Alaska Native village where a prominent priest was accused of sex abuse by four young men. 

The federal government’s early failures to manage the coronavirus shifted a heavy burden to local control. We look at how officials in two states, California and Florida, found their way to shutdown and eventual reopening and explore the intersection of politics and public health behind the decision-making process.

As Americans in all 50 states take to the streets, protesters in Minneapolis, Miami, San Francisco and other cities tell us why they’re speaking out. Then host Al Letson speaks to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is prosecuting the case against Derek Chauvin and the other officers involved in the death of George Floyd.   

Next, Letson talks to Riley Lockett, a college sophomore who has been protesting with his family in Oakland, California. 

The coronavirus pandemic has forced students to do most of their learning online, but what about the tens of millions of families who don’t have access to reliable high-speed internet? Reporter Will Carless investigates why an estimated $100 billion in federal spending has failed to close the digital divide. 

As racial disparities in health come into the spotlight amid COVID-19, we explore how the legacy of racism affects maternal health in the United States. 

First, we hear the story of Amber Rose Isaac, a woman who died in childbirth in New York, and how her death has become a rallying cry for black maternal health activists.

Reporter Priska Neely explores the complicated legacy of J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” who experimented on enslaved women in the 1840s.

After the housing bust, a group of men profited by destroying the American dream of homeownership for hundreds of thousands of families. On Reveal, we learn how these Homewreckers – many of whom are close to President Donald Trump – did it and expose how that’s putting our economy at risk amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This episode is based on reporter Aaron Glantz’s book, “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.” 

At a time when America is relying on health care workers more than ever, we look at why there’s not enough protective gear to keep them safe. 

Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren reports on why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed guidelines for protecting health workers during the pandemic and how that’s led to a patchwork of protections for doctors and nurses, who are vulnerable to catching and spreading COVID-19. 

As the pandemic sends more people online looking for entertainment, we look at how Facebook and other companies gather information about their users and turn it into profits. 

Around the country, protesters want to loosen stay-at-home orders, even though health experts say that could lead to more deaths from COVID-19. Host Al Letson speaks with Pennsylvania state Rep. Aaron Bernstine, who wants to reopen the economy. 

With millions of people unemployed because of the coronavirus, Reveal’s Aaron Glantz looks at how the economic fallout is affecting homeowners and renters – and whether this crisis could end with people losing the very homes they’re forced to isolate themselves in. 

Reveal’s Jonathan Jones takes us inside the hotel industry, where franchise owners are struggling to stay afloat amid staggering revenue losses. 

Social distancing, hand-washing and self-isolation are supposed to keep us safe from the coronavirus. But if you’re locked up in an  immigrant detention center, it’s impossible to follow those rules. Host Al Letson speaks with Reveal’s Laura C. Morel, who’s been following an asylum seeker from Cuba at a detention center in Louisiana that recently had its first case of COVID-19.

Chances are those tomatoes, strawberries or almonds you find in your grocery store come from California’s farm country. Monica Campbell of our partner The World takes us into the fields with workers, who are harvesting crops in the middle of the pandemic. She investigates how they’re being protected from the coronavirus and asks what happens if they get too sick to work. 

As the nation looks to quarantines as a way to contain the new coronavirus, host Al Letson speaks to a mom and her son, who decided to put themselves in separate quarantines after they each may have come into contact with the virus. 

Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren follows with a report on new research that shows current quarantine guidelines may not be strict enough to stop the spread. 

As the new coronavirus spreads, an ER doctor in Seattle explains how he and other front-line physicians are learning to treat patients and keep themselves safe. Dr. Nick Mark says that because the virus is so new, doctors are improvising treatments and learning from each other. 

As the new coronavirus spreads through the U.S., we chronicle how it came to California and analyze what went right and what went wrong in containing it. We hear voices of first responders, experts and passengers quarantined on a cruise ship docked in San Francisco Bay. Then we meet a scientist who developed a vaccine for a very similar virus years ago, only to have funding cut off before she could complete her work. 

The 40-year fight over drilling for oil in one of the world’s wildest places, Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is coming to a head. In 2017, Congress opened part of the refuge for oil and gas development. The Trump administration says drilling rights will go on sale any day. But opponents are trying to stop it. They say climate change is warming the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the plants, animals and people living there are struggling to adapt.

Unborn babies’ hearts are at risk as the Trump administration bows to chemical companies’ 20-year effort to debunk the science linking the dangerous chemical TCE to fetal heart defects. 

Chris Orris was born at Camp Lejeune when the drinking water was heavily contaminated with TCE. Orris had open heart surgery for a defect.

This episode originally was broadcast Sept. 14, 2019. It is the first of two shows where we are looking at how the Trump administration has turned its back on science, usually in favor of industry.

An asylum-seeking migrant girl is separated from her family at the border and enters U.S. custody at 10 years old. Now, she’s 17 and still in a shelter, even though her family is ready to take her in. They just can’t find her. They turn to reporter Aura Bogado for help.

The rest of this episode originally was broadcast April 6, 2019.

For the 2020 Spring fundraising season, here are three of our favorite Reveal stories from the past year.

Delivering donated organs quickly to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries that put patients in danger and make some organs unusable. This week, we look at weaknesses in the nation’s system for transporting organs and solutions for making it work better. More than any other organ, donated kidneys are put on commercial flights so they can get to waiting patients.

The 2020 census will make a huge imprint on the nation for a decade, from determining how much federal money goes to states to divvying up congressional seats and helping city planners figure out where to build schools. But experts warn this census is doomed to be inaccurate because of a poor rollout and a swirl of controversy over a citizenship question proposed by the Trump administration. 

In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another – works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities. 

Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers.

This episode originally was  broadcast Oct. 5, 2019.

Genetic genealogy is a powerful crime-solving tool that combines DNA science with family tree research. Where will it take us – a crime-free world or a dark dystopia?

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When the Great Recession walloped Detroit, thousands of people fell behind on property taxes and lost their homes. Today, entire blocks look like ghost towns. It turns out that hundreds of millions of dollars on those delinquent tax bills never should have been charged in the first place. For people who’ve hung onto their homes with vacancies all around them, they have the worst neighbor in town: the government.

This episode was originally broadcast in May 2016. Back in 1971, a 22-year-old journalist named Robert Rosenthal got a call from his boss at The New York Times. He told him to go to Room 1111 of the Hilton Hotel, bring enough clothes for at least a month and not tell anyone. 

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Reveal presents a special episode produced by our partners at StoryWorks, a documentary theater company. “When Lighting The Voids” is an audio drama inspired by Reveal’s investigation into a deadly explosion at a Mississippi shipyard. This deconstructed mystery is based on real accounts, real events and real people.

This episode was originally broadcast July 28, 2018. 

In December 1944, Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with a secret counterattack through the Ardennes forest, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. In the carnage that followed, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.