Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She has won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Her work draws attention to the men and women forced to do the bidding of the American security state—the so-called “third-country nationals” who were tricked into working on military bases in Iraq, the addicts coerced into serving as police informants, and the victims of civil-asset forfeiture.

Our conversation, the third episode of “The Art of the Interview,” touched on every stage of Stillman’s career, from her days as a student journalist to her current directorship of Yale’s Investigative Reporting Lab, where she helps students cultivate the relentlessness and compassion that make her a uniquely effective reporter.

Merve Emre: Most of the people in this room are college students who might look to you as an example of how a journalist can make a career. Could you tell us about how you got to where you are today?

Sarah Stillman: I got my reporting start when I was at the Yale gym my senior year, trying to figure out what I was going to do my senior thesis about. They were playing Fox News on the TV, and there was a story in Florida about this young girl, Jessica Lunsford, who went missing. Hundreds of people had come to try to find her. This was in the Nancy Grace era when there was nonstop coverage of missing and murdered white women. The news ticker on the screen said that the body found in the lake was not Jessica, and it was presented as good news.

Of course, that raised some big questions for me. Who was this other body? At the time, I was taking an investigative reporting class where I was learning about public records, so I went back to my dorm, called the sheriff’s office, and asked for the name of the body in the lake. They told me her name was Donna Joan Cook, and I did a public-record search and found that she had been repeatedly convicted of sex work–related charges starting when she was young.

My senior project became going to Florida and figuring out this young woman’s story. Ultimately, I learned that because she had mental health issues that were preventing her from paying off her fines, she had agreed to work as a confidential informant for the police. She started getting death threats from someone who she had essentially ratted out, and wound up dead soon after. My first journalistic inquiry was trying to tell not only this young woman’s story, but also how we got to a world where we have the Jessicas and the not-Jessicas. That became central to my whole reporting career—we’re trained to look at the “main story” that everyone is paying attention to in the headlines, but embedded within that are stories that have been pushed to the side.

Many people, upon seeing that news ticker, would have just kept working out. They would not have thought to call the sheriff’s office and get the name and look through the public records. Do you remember what made you want to do that?

I am a physical reporter. I pay a lot of attention to my own body; where am I curious, where am I surprised? So many of my story ideas have come out of seeing something in the news that doesn’t feel right and wanting to do some further digging. I was taking this reporting course with the amazing Bruce Shapiro, who had us each draw a piece of paper out of a hat, and we had to tell a story strictly based upon the address on the paper. Mine wound up being about a nursing home that had burned down in New Haven. There had been litigation around it, and I learned about this universe of things that were accessible. Often, we think of investigative work as someone uncovering a deep, dark secret that no one had access to, but most of the time, the compelling investigative stories are already out there in the public sphere, in dots that haven’t been looked at as a constellation. For me, that means almost always, if you’re curious, something deeper is there. Trusting my intuition has proved both helpful and really gratifying.

After you finished this piece for your college project, what happened?

I was a freshman in college when the Iraq War began. It was a big part of my formation as a journalist. I knew I wanted to do something tied to the reality that the US was in two wars by the time that I graduated, but I didn’t feel qualified to dive into investigative reporting in Iraq. I didn’t speak Arabic, I didn’t have a deep understanding of Iraqi history, and I didn’t want to parachute into a situation I was not sufficiently equipped for. So I thought about Bruce’s advice to think about your comparative advantage in any given terrain. I come from a family of labor organizers, and they’ve always taught me to think about what the experiences of working people are in any storytelling ecosystem.

When it came to the Iraq War, again, I’d seen some headlines about a group of Nepali workers who thought they had been recruited to work in fancy hotels in Jordan and Dubai, but were in fact en route to do logistics work on a US military base. I found it wasn’t just a few people; the US had brought some 60,000 people in from Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka, all around the world to do these jobs, and often, those people were lied to. That is another example of a piece that was at the margins of a conventional story.

That became the premise of the first piece you ever wrote for The New Yorker, “The Invisible Army.” You tell the story of two beauticians from Fiji who have been recruited into doing service work for the US army in Iraq when they thought they would be working at a salon in Dubai. How do you decide who the main characters are going to be in a piece?

That was a major journey, because I had no idea what I was doing. I arrived at the largest US military base in Baghdad, and instantaneously, when you arrive, you see a Cinnabon and Pizza Hut and a beauty salon staffed entirely by people who had been recruited there.

How did you end up on the US military base?

I was an embed with a military police unit in Iraq. At the time the military offered journalists a chance to work alongside US military forces. In my case, I had to do that to get on to the base. I didn’t think it’d be the best idea to say to the government, “I would like to investigate your human trafficking practices. Can I come hang out with you?” So I simultaneously did stories for the official embedment and reported on this trafficking issue. At the beginning, I wasn’t savvy about approaching people in the right spaces. I went into the beauty salon, thinking, I’ll just get a manicure and quietly ask some questions. They said they loved their jobs, that they were so lucky to be here. I quickly realized I could not ask things in the vicinity of their employers.

There was a bus circulating around the base, driven by a Sri Lankan guy. I started chatting with him. Like the women in the salon, he kept saying “Everything is great! We’re very happy here.” I saw him again and again, and finally, one night, I was on the bus when no one else was on it, and he broke down in tears. “This is a horrific situation, we were lied to about why we’re here. There are loan sharks coming after my family and the families around us, chasing down the money we paid to get the jobs, our passports were taken,” a whole litany of horrors. Once I learned the right way to do it, I spoke to more than a hundred people, almost all of whom had a horrific story of their recruitment and what they’d faced on the base.

The reason I chose to go with the Fijian women is that they had lived the arc of the experience. They had been approached at beauty salons in their home countries with someone promising them $3,800 a month and they agreed. Instead, they went to a transit country and then found out they were going to Iraq. One of them was sexually assaulted by her employer. I was able to follow the full trajectory to when they got home and were safely situated. Oftentimes, it’s complex reporting terrain when people have reasons to feel afraid of telling their stories, and a lot of the process is figuring out who’s in a safe position to talk, and who wants to talk. And these women really wanted their stories to be known.

How do you get people to trust you?

A lot of it is being alongside them in their day-to-day experiences. I wound up being in some critical moments with them, including the night that one of them was assaulted. I went to her containerized housing unit, basically a shipping container, where they all lived. When they opened the door, one of them was crying and explained what had happened. All around the base, I had seen these posters for the military sexual assault hotline, but these women didn’t have access to that type of phone, because you had to be a service member or have access to US media sources to get it, so they asked me if I’d be willing to call. In journalism, you’re taught not to get involved, but my ethos has always been showing up, first and foremost, as a human. So I called the emergency hotline, and no one answered. I called repeatedly, and finally, when I got through, they told me to call the company. So I called the company, and they said, “We don’t handle touchy-feely issues. Call the military.” I was with these women in some intense processes, and that was bonding glue. But with a lot of stories, I ask people if I can follow along for the softer moments in the day. It’s meaningful trust, building time.

That’s interesting, because for many of the people we’ve spoken with, the interview requires a setup that is different from the movement of day-to-day life.

I would feel so panicked if I had one chance to do an interview. What I’m seeking in an interview is earning the right to return—establishing care, rapport, trust, and mutual interest so that we can have many conversations thereafter.

There are two ways that you’re very present in that piece. One is the moment when you call the sexual assault hotline, and the other is when, based on your investigation, an inquiry is opened into the status of these women back in Washington, D.C. I’m curious about what it’s like when your presence as a reporter changes the direction the story takes. How do you think of balancing the journalist in you with the labor activist or feminist activist?

It was panic inducing, because I had been working on this story for a year, and I got a call from a Washington Post reporter who had found a PowerPoint slide the military was using internally, which said that they had found out about this human trafficking incident a journalist was alleging. They called me to investigate the story. I had been roundly rejected after I had gone to Iraq, gone to Afghanistan, found hundreds of people who could testify to being starved or abused on US bases. I thought that would be sufficient, but I was rejected by the publications I’d sent it out to, which said that people had war fatigue. They also had a hard time taking a risk on a young journalist. I met this guy who said, “You should just write the Platonic ideal of the piece that you want to write.” So I sat down and crafted that version of the story.

When the US government got involved and changed the course of the investigation, I benefited tremendously because I was a young journalist who did not know the art of the interview. I had been nervous to ask the core questions you have to ask to craft a granular narrative. I felt like it was too personal and I didn’t want to violate someone’s privacy or retraumatize them. But one of the Fijian women, Vinnie, was brought to the US and met with lawyers at the State Department who were looking into whether they could sue on her behalf. They let me come to the meeting where the lawyers interviewed her, and the art of the interview for a litigator is an incredible thing to watch. They do the thing that Seymour Hersh talks about, “the chron,” which is just mapping out the sequence of events. They start at the very beginning, “Who came to you in the salon?” “What did he look like?” “What was he wearing?” They went through a thousand questions I would have never asked. But Vinnie started talking in a different way, and it taught me the dialectical nature of the interview.

You start being curious, respectful but mindful that there may be areas the person doesn’t want to cover. I’ve learned a practice of setting the table, saying, “I would love to hear everything that you’re willing to share. If we hit upon realms where you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay too”—putting the agency very explicitly back in the other person’s hands but trusting them to go there. At this point in my job, I’ve learned how deeply people want to be heard, and how when you start asking the granular questions, people rise to the occasion. That has been a beautiful thing for me to learn from and really transformed how I think about interviews.

What did you learn from that first foray into interviewing, reporting, writing the story, and having it edited and released?

I learned how to be more organized, because if you take on a project that spans months or years, you have to file interviews and PDFs, photographs, the full terrain. Also, because I’m a massive over-reporter and over-interviewer, I learned to boil it down to my rule of five: What are the five things that have to come through in the story, and who are the people within it that can carry me from the beginning to the end?

How do you deal with difficult and resistant subjects?

I’m not good at getting the problematic figures in a piece to talk. When I was reporting in Iraq, they treated me like I was writing for the student newspaper. When I was younger, I would constantly be dismissed. Then I realized that’s a real asset. They are blowing you off and allowing you to wander about, and they can’t even fathom that someone who looked as I did at the time could be doing substantive investigative work. Navigating the frustrations of that was fruitful in certain ways.

What you’ve articulated is essentially the Joan Didion school of reporting, which is, the more you make yourself seem as if you’re small and unserious, or feminized, the more people will reveal in front of you without thinking twice about what they’re revealing.

I wish I could say I did it the Joan Didion way. I worked so hard to be taken seriously, but it still didn’t happen, so I just went with it. Some of the best quotes I’ve gotten have been from people explaining why they can’t talk to me. If someone just went through a traumatic experience and said they didn’t want to talk and explained why, I would treat that as off the record. But in the case of people who have perpetrated serious harms against others and explain why they can’t talk to me, that’s not off the record. I did a piece on civil-asset forfeiture where this police department in Texas was pulling over almost every driver of color who passed through, checking if they had cash in the car and threatening to send those people’s kids into foster care if they didn’t let them seize the cash and sign it away. In that case, the officer who was leading the ring gave me a thirty-minute explanation of why he couldn’t talk to me that included how he’d gotten messages from God about how he had to seize their money. I wound up using that in the piece.

I almost never go into an interview thinking about it in the reductive way I just presented, “the other side.” I find that most of the time, people are complex actors who are not inherently malicious. I’m really interested in what motivated someone who was part of a system engaged in, for instance, profiteering. I’ve had some fruitful and surprising interviews, and a huge key is to not make assumptions. I hate reporting that feels like someone had a preexisting equation. I am genuinely interested in what animates all the actors in a piece and I try to read the drafts while projecting my imagination into the minds of the different figures involved, including the folks accused of something serious. At The New Yorker, we have a no surprises policy; we call people in the fact-checking process. I love that because often you’ll learn rich things when calling to confront someone about something serious that they’re accused of. You learn more layers to the story, and that is valuable, not just lip service.

You’ve done a lot of reporting recently on family separation and deportation. Do you approach interview subjects who are young and vulnerable in a different way?

That’s a really complicated one. I’ve been thinking a lot about what informed consent really means, not just when someone’s a child, but in recent circumstances in which the situation one is in has its own coercive power. I worked on a piece about the Trump administration’s secretive third-country deportations, and I got a call on a Saturday morning from a military detention camp in Ghana. There were eleven people on the phone call, and all of them were in absolute terror. Sweat was streaming down their faces; they looked the most afraid of anyone I’ve ever interviewed.

They were people who had, in many cases, lived in the US for a long time. Some of them were more recent asylum seekers, including several women who had fled female genital mutilation in Togo. They’d gotten protection from being sent back to Togo in a US immigration court, and this administration chose to send them to Ghana, which was going to send them back to their home country. The moment I spoke to them, they were trying to get a journalist to write about their predicament, because they feared they were about to be sent back.

That situation was almost more complicated than interviewing children. If I had spoken to them prior to their deportation, they would never have wanted to speak about their immigration circumstances. But I caught them in this moment when they had a profound, urgent, truly life-threatening need, and that made them willing to speak. It made me think about the complex politics of what it means for someone to consent.

With kids, it’s important to brainstorm how we build proper safeguards for the reporting. Kids can bring forth so many creative ideas that can resonate with a reader about the consequences of this administration’s policies. I did a project some years ago about people who had come to the US seeking asylum, who got deported, and then were killed or harmed after their deportations. I wrote about a woman in Texas, Laura, and her family who had lived here for many years. She had an abusive ex-partner who had been deported to Mexico. She got pulled over for a minor traffic violation and while she had two children who were US citizens, she was sent back across the border the same day. When they deported her, she told the border officers verbatim, “When I’m killed next week, my blood will be on your hands.” And that’s exactly what happened.

I went down there and spent time with Laura’s mother and with her kids. One of the ways I wrote about that in the piece, thinking about how to both honor their experience and not violate their privacy, was sharing some writings that the kids had done for their mom. They had an annual tradition where they each wrote a poem, put them on balloons, and released them. One of the kids had also written a separate poem that he was willing to share. I thought that would be one way to kind of incorporate his voice in a way that he felt proud of.

You’re very good at incorporating voices that other reporters might not necessarily think about bringing in. I am so impressed by your piece on the felony murder doctrine, “Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away,” because on the one hand, you are speaking to a person convicted of felony murder, and on the other, you’re speaking to the stepson of his alleged victim, who doesn’t believe in the felony murder doctrine and finds it to be unjust. One of the most impressive things about that piece is your movement between those two subjects. There’s a kinship you unearth between them, even though they ought to be on opposite sides of the issue. I’m curious to hear how that piece came about and how your conversations with them led to the structure.

For years I’d wanted to write about the felony murder doctrine. It’s a law that states that people involved in a felony where someone dies, even if they weren’t present, can be convicted of first-degree murder with mandatory life in prison without parole. I knew of many interesting cases, and I’d always been looking for the right one. Then a friend told me about Ian Marcus, with whom I start the piece. In that case, two young men in Florida went out to a casino and lost a bunch of money, so they were taking loose change and minor items from unlocked vehicles. A neighbor saw them and called the police, who came and arrested one of the guys, Sadik Baxter. While they put him in handcuffs, his friend was in his vehicle and fled, winding up in a high-speed chase with the police during which he hit and killed two bicyclists, one of whom was Ian’s father.

Sadik was prosecuted for two first-degree murders, even though he was not at the scene, because of the felony murder doctrine. Ian and his family were upset about this, because not only had they lost their father, but Sadik was going to lose his ability to be with his kid. It was this profound illustration of how the doctrine worked and why it feels bizarre. The judge himself said, “My hands are tied, but I don’t think this makes sense.” I called Ian, he said he wasn’t ready to talk, maybe someday, but not right now. I followed up a year later, and he was ready to talk, as were his sisters. I also found my way to Sadik’s family and to Sadik in prison. It was confusing, because at first he was so excited to talk to me: “Oh my God, I’ve been searching for years for a journalist. I wrote to Kim Kardashian, I wrote to Barack Obama, and no one has gotten back to me. I was hoping to find someone.” But then, as we started the interviews, he was monosyllabic. It was the inverse of every other interview; he was down to talk about the case, but not about his personal life.

Why do you think that was?

I truly was exasperated; I almost gave up. To make a New Yorker story work, you want to feel like all parties want to be talking to you, it won’t work if they’re not. In a last-ditch effort, I flew down to Florida to visit him in prison in Okaloosa. It is not an easy place to get to; he had not had a visitor in five years. I got a rental car, I drove down, and everything opened up from there. He’s one of the most creative, interesting, amazing conversationalists I’ve ever known. He explained that he was aware there’s a private security company that listens to all phone calls when you’re incarcerated. For-profit phone companies have commandeered the phone lines, so it’s both very expensive and hyper-surveilled. He hated the idea that after being screwed over by so many systems, they would now have access to all his intimate life.

I also was turned away three times because of the pants that I was wearing. The first guard said they were scandalous. I came back in black pants, and they said those pants were see-through in the hot Florida sun. I changed into a third pair, which they said were not see-through but could become see-through if I started to sweat. I was losing my mind. But luckily, with his help negotiating and my own pleading, I got in to see him. I think in that whole process, he recognized that I was who I said I was.

What pants did you end up wearing?

The white pants, and they were right about them being see-through when I sweat. I also thought I’d pulled a trick on them, because they took away my paper and pen, so I asked them for a copy of the prison’s rules about clothing, turned it over, and used it as my notepad. But they took that away too. It was a reminder that they don’t want interviewing happening in those spaces, and don’t want to give incarcerated people the right to share their stories openly.

It has been interesting to hear from our guests about the circumstances in which people do not want interviews to take place. How has your approach to interviewing changed between the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, and the second Trump administration?

I have learned helpful lessons from my own reporting failures during the first Trump administration. I fell into a state of severe existential despair, wondering if I was just becoming a vehicle for them to distribute more fear and terror. Those questions remain for me, but in watching what unfolded with the family separation crisis, I learned that this administration is always testing the boundaries of what they can get away with, and sometimes, they hit those boundaries when communities take to the streets.

For family separation work, I had just finished a story about a woman in Texas, which I had begun at the tail end of the Obama years, about people being deported to their deaths. Soon thereafter, Trump took office. I started looking into the decimation of asylum policy. I’d found some early accounts of people who’d been separated and was trying to figure out if it was something we could write about. My editor said we should check with the administration to see if it was a formal policy. I went to the administration, and they said they were not doing it. I actually believed them, because they were loudly owning their immigration enforcement policies. The following spring, they unveiled the zero-tolerance prosecutions and started the widespread practice of family separations. Thanks to incredible reporting by folks like Caitlin Dickerson, we learned that they had been doing early testing of that policy to see if they could get away with it. When they did it on a large scale, we saw a lot of incredible reporting, and tons of mass protests with people taking to the streets. We’re seeing that again with what’s unfolded in the immigration enforcement actions in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, but it has taken the killing of two white US citizens, one of them being a male gun owner, to begin to hit up against the boundaries.

We cannot underestimate the power of what it takes for both incredible organizers and the people who are directly affected to have the courage to tell stories with more tools than ever, which I think is an incredibly influential and important part of the media ecosystem right now, but it also takes deep investigative reporting. There are a lot of things told to the public, but there’s always the secret layer. With third-country deportations, they told a lot publicly, tweeting about “deporting the worst of the worst,” sending them to Eswatini or Ghana, but beneath that, there was the secrecy unveiled by reporting, like the financial deals made with these countries. We need both the people who are willing to come forth and share their stories, and we need the journalism that’s going to unearth that. I’ve never felt as deeply or seen as much evidence for why we need reporting.