Jane Mayer

Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers, was published to critical acclaim.

Mayer was born in New York City. Her mother, Meredith (née Nevins), is a painter, print-maker, and former president of the Manhattan Graphics Center. Her father, William Mayer, was a composer. Her paternal great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. Her maternal grandparents were Mary Fleming (Richardson) and Allan Nevins, a historian, and John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s authorized biographer.

Mayer attended two private non-secondary schools: Fieldston, in the northwest area of the Bronx borough of New York City, and—as an exchange student in 1972-1973—Bedales, a boarding school in the village of Steep, Hampshire, England. A 1977 magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as senior editor of the Yale Daily News and as campus stringer for Time magazine. She continued her studies at the University of Oxford.

Mayer began her career as a journalist in Vermont, writing for two small weekly papers, The Weathersfield Weekly and The Black River Tribune, before moving to the daily Rutland Herald. She worked as a metropolitan reporter for the now-defunct Washington Star and, in 1982, joined The Wall Street Journal, where she worked for 12 years. She was the first woman at the WSJ to be named White House correspondent and, subsequently, senior writer and front page editor.

She served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal, where she reported on the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Mayer also contributes to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Prospect.

Mayer has co-authored two books: Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (co-authored with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989; co-authored with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Strange Justice was adapted as a 1999 Showtime television movie of the same name, starring Delroy Lindo, Mandy Patinkin, and Regina Taylor. Strange Justice was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and both books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Time magazine said of Strange Justice: "Its portrait of Thomas as an id suffering in the role of a Republican superego is more detailed and convincing than anything that has appeared so far." Of Landslide, The New York Times Washington correspondent Steven V. Roberts said, "This is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail... I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here." In an Elle magazine interview, Mayer said about her next article, “I’m focusing broadly on stories about abuses of power, threats to democracy, and corruption.”