Nina Burleigh


Nina D. Burleigh is an American writer and investigative journalist who writes books, articles, essays and reviews which explore, among many topics, the tension between belief and science, religion and rationality in post-Enlightenment life. Burleigh is strongly sympathetic to secular liberalism, and is known for her interest in issues of women's rights, having previously written a colum for The New York Observer called "The Bombshell". She is the author of multiple books, including Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, about the scholars who accompanied Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798; Unholy Business, chronicling a Biblical archaeological forgery case and the Jerusalem relic trade. Burleigh is a national investigative journalist, with previous publications including The Fatal Gift of Beauty, on the wrongful imprisonment of American student Amanda Knox.. Her recent work has included five years covering Trump as a National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek. Most recently Burleigh's writing has been published in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The New York Times, and GEN/Medium.

Early life

Her father is author Robert Burleigh. Burleigh's family moved to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco when she was seven. After a few months in San Francisco, they moved to Baghdad to live with Burleigh's maternal grandmother. Six months later the family moved to an Amish area of Michigan. They always celebrated Christmas with Santa and a tree, Burleigh stated that her family had "rejected institutional religion" by the time she grew up in the 1970s. "No baptism, no family Bible recording the births, deaths and marriages. My grandfather actively despised churches."
Burleigh earned a bachelor’s degree in English from MacMurray College, a master’s in English from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting from University of Illinois at Springfield in 1984.
Her first publication was for a library in Elgin, Illinois, when she was in sixth grade.

Career

From January 2015 to January 2020 Burleigh was the National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek. "In college I thought I might go into fiction writing, but a professor of mine…suggested I could get paid as a journalism intern at the Illinois Statehouse, through a program called the Public Affairs Reporting Program. I got an internship at the Associated Press, and learned a lot about government and writing journalism there”. Burleigh refers to her time as an intern as instrumental for learning "real reporting." ' Burleigh covered the White House and Congress for People and Time in the 1990s.
In the 2000s she was a staff writer at People magazine in New York, covering human interest stories nationally. She was an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, and is also a guest lecturer at the University of Agder, and wrote "The Bombshell" column for the New York Observer, and was a contributing editor to Elle. She is an occasional blogger at The Huffington Post. She has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers, including Time magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian,, as well as many websites such as Slate.com, TomPaine.com, AlterNet, Powell's Salon.com, and GEN/Medium.
Burleigh attributes her extensive range of journalistic topics by firsthand experience, instructive in maintaining an open outlook, describing a journey to the Mexico border where she witnessed migrants being located to shelters provided by an altruistic private benefactor. '

Women's issues

Burleigh has written extensively on feminism, issues of human trafficking, domestic violence, and double standards for violence against women, American women and power and politics. She coined the term "Baby Palins” to refer to the young right wing women who decry feminism while benefiting from its gains. She has written that "misogyny is the last allowable taboo in our PC world". She has also written on women and health care and reproductive law as well as the issues and complications of adoption.

Middle East

Burleigh has written about her visits to Iraq, her mother's country of birth, both as a child and later in life as a journalist. She has also written about her maternal grandmother's escape from the Assyrian genocide during World War I in the context of present-day refugee crises. Burleigh worked in the Middle East for many years, including covering the politics of the Israeli settlements for Time Magazine, the emerging effect of Islamists on women in the wake of the Arab Spring for Slate and Time, and the politics and science of Biblical archaeology in Israel for her book Unholy Business and for the Los Angeles Times.

Biblical archaeology

Burleigh spent several years working on a book about Biblical archaeology and forgery in Israel. The Wall Street Journal said, “Burleigh uses the story of the James Ossuary to trace the eccentric and sometimes dodgy characters who buy, trade and deal in antiquities. But it is also a springboard for her larger meditation on the field of biblical archaeology. In the 19th century, when the discipline emerged, practitioners saw themselves as both religious pilgrims and serious scholars, perceiving no potential for conflict in their desire to prove the historicity of the Bible. It has only been in recent decades that biblical archaeology truly widened its scope and began to focus not only on the Bible but on the larger world in which biblical events unfolded.”
She has written and lectured on the subject of Biblical archaeology both in her book and elsewhere, speaking on the topic at the Center for Inquiry, in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York, as well as at the Oriental Institute in Chicago and at Duke University’s Seminar on Biblical archaeology and the media.

Amanda Knox case and Italy

In June 2009 Burleigh and her family moved to the Italian city of Perugia, where Knox was being tried on a murder charge, to write a book. Burleigh initially intended the story to be an exploration of young women's experiences and media portrayal in the modern world. Within a month Burleigh concluded that much of what was commonly believed about Knox was without foundation, and began to question whether she was in any way involved in the killing. The book strongly advocated the case for the by-then-convicted Knox's innocence, and became a NYT bestseller. Burleigh said she was in some ways uncomfortable with the degree of media concentration on the case, as there were miscarriages of justice affecting all communities.
Burleigh has written extensively about many other aspects of travel and life in Italy, including Chinese immigration, mafia slave labor, gelato school, expatriates and the Gothic.

Melania Trump

In January 2019 the Daily Telegraph was forced to apologize and pay "substantial damages" for publishing an article written by Burleigh titled “The Mystery of Melania” that the Telegraph admitted contained numerous falsehoods. “Trump often refers to opportunists out to advance themselves by disparaging her name and image," Stephanie Grisham, Trump's communications director, said in a statement to CNN. "She will not sit by as people and media outlets make up lies and false assertions in a race for ratings or to sell tabloid headlines." Burleigh, however, stands by the article, which was actually an except from her 2018 book The Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women. “The book was published in October and has been widely excerpted and reported on in American publications. . . The book was lawyered for months in advance of publication,” Burleigh said. “Furthermore, the points they objected to include facts that have been previously reported by other writers." She also criticized the Telegraph for apologizing for “accurate reporting” and called the apology “regrettable,” when the Telegraph simply lacked the resources to back-check her reporting in the first lady’s home country of Slovenia. On January 30th, 2019 Burleigh's lawyers threatened the Telegraph parent company TMG with a lawsuit:

Personal life

In 1999 she married Erik Freeland, a freelance photojournalist. They and their two children live in New York City. When her son was a toddler, Burleigh thought it might be a good idea to expose her child to church. She picked out the most picturesque one she could find in her town and visited. She discovered that the inside was very beautiful with stained glass windows, but the programs she picked up changed her mind, they were "urging parishioners to contact their lawmakers about fetal rights, gay marriage and other favorite fundamentalist issues. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I gathered up the toddler, who was fascinated by the place and didn't want to leave, and scurried back into daylight."
In a 1998 essay for Mirabella, Burleigh described an occasion aboard Air Force One when she noticed President Bill Clinton apparently looking at her legs. The piece led to her being described as "the Ally McBeal of former White House reporters" by columnist Ellen Goodman. During a subsequent interview with a Washington Post media reporter to discuss the Mirabella article, Burleigh offered to perform a sex act on then President Clinton, stating “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” Referring to the comment in a 2007 piece for The Huffington Post, Burleigh wrote, "I said it because I thought it was high time for someone to tweak the white, middle-aged beltway gang taking Clinton to task for sexual harassment. These men had neither the personal experience nor the credentials to know sexual harassment when they saw it, nor to give a good goddamn about it if they did. The insidious use of sexual harassment laws to bring down a president for his pro-female politics was the context in which I spoke."

Books