Hadley Freeman

Hadley Clare Freeman (born 15 May 1978) is an American British journalist based in London. She writes for The Sunday Times, having previously written for The Guardian. Freeman was born in New York City to a Jewish family. Her father worked in finance. The family moved to London when Freeman was 11. She has dual British and American citizenship.

Freeman suffered from anorexia and was treated in a psychiatric unit during six different periods between ages 13 and 17. After taking her A-level examinations while boarding at the Cambridge Centre for Sixth-form Studies, she read English literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, and edited the student newspaper Cherwell. After a year in Paris, Freeman worked on the fashion desk of The Guardian for eight years. 

She joined The Guardian in 2000, has worked for the newspaper as a staff writer and columnist, and contributes to the UK version of Vogue. Following an article for The Guardian in July 2013 criticizing misogynistic behavior, Freeman received a bomb threat on Twitter.

Freeman's books include The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to (Almost) All Things Fashionable in 2009 and Are Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies in 2013, which was described by Jennifer Lipman in The Jewish Chronicle as "a detailed attack on how women are both portrayed and conditioned to act in public life." Life Moves Pretty Fast appeared in 2015.

In March 2020, House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family were published. It is an account of the lives of her grandmother Sala Glass and her three brothers, Alex, Jacques, and Henri, in Poland, France, and the United States during the course of the twentieth century. Karen Heller wrote in The Washington Post that Freeman is "an exacting historian" who "tackles anti-Semitism, Jewish guilt and success."

Freeman ended her Weekend Guardian column in September 2021 after 5½ years to concentrate on interviews for the newspaper. A memoir recounting her teenage experience of anorexia is scheduled to be published by Fourth Estate in spring 2023. In November 2022, Freeman announced that she would leave The Guardian and write for The Sunday Times.

In June 2018, Freeman denounced the treatment of undocumented child immigrants arriving in America, drawing parallels with her grandmother's experience of escaping from the Holocaust. Freeman described it as deliberate cruelty by the Trump administration and a reflection of latent racism amongst its supporters.

In November 2018, U.S. journalists from The Guardian published an opinion piece criticizing a Guardian editorial about the Gender Recognition Act, claiming it was transphobic. In tweets, Freeman defended the editorial. She has since been cited as expressing views that trans-allied feminists consider transphobic. 

In June 2021, Freeman used her regular opinion column in The Guardian to describe that she had "lost at least a dozen friends over this ... friends who have told me my beliefs are transphobic". She later said that there was an "atmosphere of real fear" at the paper over their coverage of trans issues, not allowing her and others to write on gender issues and barring her from interviewing J. K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova, who has known views on transgender people. After 22 years of working for the Guardian, she left the newspaper when she was refused permission to follow up on the controversy surrounding the trans charity Mermaids.

Freeman often discusses cinema, particularly from the 1980s, in her articles and occasionally in broadcasts. She has said that her favorite film is Ghostbusters and that she has a collection of related books and articles. She has twin sons and a daughter.