Dead To Me: my new podcast coming soon
by akopsa
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Author Archives: akopsa
On Slow Journalism – Nieman Interview
by akopsa
Andy Kopsa is a freelancer crafting her career from longform journalism, specializing in investigations. She has written for The Atlantic, The Nation and even Teen Vogue and was the recipient of a 2013 Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion in American Public Life from USC Annenberg. For The Nation, she tracked down LGBT inmates in Cameroon. Spent time with a mother who was gang-raped in front of her child for a piece in Cosmopolitan. And looked at the shaming of possible rape victim for the Riverfront […]
Categories: Uncategorized
On Grief – NYTimes
by akopsa
I got a text message from my father. My first thought: impossible — that old man doesn’t know how to text. My second thought: impossible — my father is dead. My dad died on Sept. 4 — a Tuesday — just a month shy of his 82nd birthday. He was a farmer, just like my grandfather, and was the hardest working man I knew. There are four of us kids; my brother and I just over a year apart, then a five-year gap and two sisters […]
Categories: Uncategorized
Cambodia, free press and elections
by akopsa
Click image of PM Hun Sen above for my report from Cambodia this summer @ PRI
Categories: Uncategorized
Emily
by akopsa
For families like the Koesters, health care is more than just politicians arguing on cable news. In the year after the kidney transplant, Emily was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma, had her lymph nodes removed from her neck as well as her adenoids, and started chemotherapy. During that same period, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of dwarfism called Schimke immuno-osseous dysplasia (SIOD), which is also fatal. At the time, Erin says, the family was covered […]
Categories: Uncategorized
Guns
by akopsa
My first night in Louisville, Jim showed me his guns. The born-and-bred Kentucky boy stores them in a hulking safe with a keypad lock, hidden inside a walk-in closet. Over 5 feet tall and almost 4 feet wide, it easily holds Jim’s collection of pistols, rifles and handguns, with room to spare. Lining the back of the door is a leather organizer with more guns snugly tucked in its pockets. One by one, Jim pulled out gun after gun, […]
Categories: Investigations
Taylor Hirth “Perfect Victim” Chases Justice
by akopsa
Taylor Hirth and I are curled up on a leather couch at the home of her friend in Kansas City, Missouri. It is late afternoon, and the only light in the room is from the television playing a tape of Taylor, now 31, sitting in a police interview room. I watch her as she scrutinizes every word and movement on the screen. Is there something that she didn’t say right? Is she remembering all of this correctly? Could she have done […]
Categories: Investigations
Shaming and Failing
by akopsa
How a Bungled Police Investigation Led to a Possible Rape Victim’s Shaming One sexual-assault kit. Clothing — underwear, dress pants, sport jacket, white shirt and shoes. Four vials of blood. One container of urine. Photos of bruises and abrasions on the woman’s body. Dried secretions, soil and debris, suspected semen and saliva. Matted hair cuttings. The Jefferson City Police Department gathered all these things from a young woman named Brittany Burke after she called them to report a possible sexual […]
Categories: Investigations • Tags: sexual assault
The Misleading Message About Gun Control
by akopsa
My love of target shooting came late in life thanks to a reporting trip to Kentucky in 2013. I was there to cover the ease with which one can purchase a firearm and buckets of bullets, and to hit up a gun show where I could have bought a rifle literally off some guy’s back, no questions asked. I went to the range with a buddy of mine, and not only did I have a ball, I found I am also a […]
Categories: Opinion
Women & HIV
by akopsa
As the 2016 International AIDS Conference was underway in Durban last month, I was reminded of Florence Buluba, a Ugandan woman I met at the 2012 biennial gathering in Washington, D.C. Buluba ran the National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Not two years later, I found myself in in Buluba’s office, situated atop one of Kampala’s seven hills. Her organization serves HIV-positive women who lack access to basic reproductive health care, antiretroviral therapy, and STI prevention. Buluba spoke passionately […]
Categories: HIV/AIDS
Limitations
by akopsa
After this month, victims of pedophile priests in the Catholic church will no longer be able to find justice – at least, not in Hawaii or Minnesota, two states that extended the statute of limitations (SOL) after a renewed wave of allegations came to light in 2013. This is yet another perfect example of our country’s willful ignorance about rape and sexual abuse. Why are there SOLs in these cases at all? There shouldn’t be. It’s already impossible in most other […]
Categories: Opinion
Mississippi
by akopsa
Sex Ed Without Condoms? Welcome to Mississippi Last fall I sat at friend’s dining table in Jackson, Mississippi, talking with people about sex, politics and religion. These subjects are rarely mentioned individually in polite Southern company — the idea of discussing them all at the same time took on an air of scandal. As it happens, these topics are my specialty as an investigative reporter, and Mississippi lured me by topping two national lists: the state is the most religious in […]
Categories: Investigations
Cameroon
by akopsa
The daily tally of prisoners in Yaoundé Central Prison, on the outskirts of Yaoundé, Cameroon, is on a chalkboard the size of a Ping-Pong table affixed to the wall. Today there are 4,113. The prison administrator—we started calling him “the Governor”—tracks the inmates. This one is in the hospital, that one is being transferred, another set free. Murderers, petty thieves, carjackers and burglars are among the 4,113—and at least twenty of the prisoners housed at Yaoundé Central Prison are there just […]
Categories: Investigations
