Loretta Tofani

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Loretta Tofani is an American journalist. In 1982, while a staff writer at The Washington Post, she wrote a series of articles about a pattern of widespread gang rape inside a Maryland jail for which she won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize. The series was notable for its documentation: Tofani obtained the victims' medical records and interviewed the victims as well as the rapists. The victims were innocent, charged with drunk driving and shop lifting, in jail because they did not have enough money for bond. The rapists, whose photographs were displayed in the series, were convicted murderers and armed robbers. The jail changed its policies as a result of the series. After nine years at The Washington Post, Tofani in 1987 became a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, serving as the paper's Beijing Bureau Chief from 1992 through 1996. She wrote for the Inquirer for 14 years. She won other national awards at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was a finalist for another Pulitzer Prize. She and her family moved to Ogden, Utah in 2001.

Tofani earned a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University in 1975 and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She had a Fulbright fellowship to Japan in 1983. She recently wrote a series of articles on China, with a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C. Tofani was interviewed on the News Hour (PBS) after the story's completion which ran in the Salt Lake Tribune entitled "American Imports, Chinese Deaths." The articles reveal the real cost of globalization: In the name of low prices, Chinese workers are exposed to poisonous air and faulty machinery which frequently caused the loss of limbs.

Date of birth: Feb. 5, 1953, New York City