Katie Tarrant

Having only been promoted from the Sunday Times graduate trainee scheme last year, I’m delighted to have secured accountability for vulnerable people who have been failed by institutions, and to

have pursued important stories across Europe and the Middle East.

One of my investigations uncovered miscarriages of justices within Scouting. I revealed a string of deaths of children on trips where leaders were accused of negligence. It involved building trust with several families and Scout leaders who had never spoken to the press before, and obtaining correspondence which called into question the Scouts’ response to the deaths. After we published my investigation, more families came forward and a coroner opened a fresh interrogation into the death of an autistic Scout. The Scouts’ CEO resigned in March. After I broke the story, it was followed for weeks in the national newspapers. 

In February, after identifying an angle on the Gaza-Israel war which had been missed by the British press, I secured an exclusive interview with the first female Israeli conscientious objector to be jailed since October 7 th on the cusp of her sentencing. The persecution of conscientious objectors is condemned internationally due to the understanding that conscripts have the right to object on moral grounds. I spent a week in the country at war, interviewing Sofia Orr and her peers in Tel Aviv and northern Israel, including a serving soldier who felt conflicted about their part in the war. Sofia’s case was later highlighted by Channel 4 and the Independent.

Alongside reporting on human rights issues at home and abroad, I have been developing a specialism in the reporting of sexual assault. Whether it’s securing a police investigation for the victims of alleged sex trafficker, philanthropist and Tory donor Hamish Ogston, or contributing to reporting on the Russell Brand scandal, I have been thorough when gathering evidence and sensitive in my approach. I used this in September when reporting from Avignon. In a piece that required careful legal and ethical consideration, I interviewed one of the 50 defendants standing trial for the rape of Gisele Pelicot with my brilliant co-author Ella Joyner, who translated for me. It was the first example of this kind of reporting in the British media and was crucial for communicating something that had been lost in trial reporting so far: that many of these men see themselves as a victim of a conspiracy.

The following month, working with the Insight team, we published the Duchy files, for which I travelled hundreds of miles across the UK gaining the trust of Duchy tenants and obtaining property contracts to stand up our bombshell news lines about the monarchy's secret property portfolio. Separately, it was my idea to dig into then-unsubstantiated allegations against the hugely popular wellness guru Wim Hof. After months of working with sources in the UK, US, South Africa and the Netherlands, we published my expose into the potential dangers of his method. It was the best read story that weekend.