Bill Dedman

Bill Dedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, an investigative reporter for Newsday, and co-author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.

Often relying on public records as much as insider accounts, Dedman has reported and written influential investigative articles on racial discrimination by mortgage lenders and real estate agents, racial profiling by police, interrogation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and efforts to understand and prevent school shootings. His work includes one of the early examinations, in 1990, of the cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church of allegations of sexual abuse by a priest.

While working for NBC News as an investigative reporter, Dedman uncovered the case of the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark. He documented her life in a series of reports on NBCNews.com and The Today Show from 2010-2012. Dedman reported the Clark mystery first in an online slideshow, a series of 47 photos with 2,788 accompanying words in captions. The slideshow attracted more than 75 million page views than any story in the website's history.

Dedman and Clark's cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr, co-wrote the 2013 nonfiction book Empty Mansions about Clark and her father, the Gilded Age industrialist William A. Clark.

Published September 10, 2013, by Ballantine Books, Empty Mansions debuted at No. 4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction and was the No. 1 bestselling nonfiction e-book in America. Empty Mansions has been published in translation in China, Brazil, and Italy and English in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth countries. In addition, Hollywood writer-director Ryan Murphy optioned Empty Mansions for a feature film.

Dedman has received the Investigative Reporters and Editors award, the Worth Bingham Prize for national investigative reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award grand prize, recognition from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for investigative reporting and creative use of online media, the Society of Professional Journalists national award for online investigative reporting, and others.