Jessica Bennett has spent her award-winning journalism career writing with a gimlet eye toward gender, sexuality, politics and culture — from workplace inequality to the ripple effects of #MeToo. She was the first-ever gender editor of The New York Times, where she is now a contributing editor, most recently penning the viral piece —“The Audacity of E Jean Carroll”— after covering her sexual assault and defamation trials against Donald Trump. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of two bestselling books: Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace and This Is 18: Girls’ Lives Through Girls’ Eyes.
As a writer, Jessica has profiled and shaped our understanding of public figures including Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson, Amanda Knox, as well as Kathy Hochul (the first female governor of New York), often at pivotal moments of reckoning or transition. She has written features on callout culture, the academic study of masculinity, and chronicled the battle for a more inclusive Miss America pageant. She spent months investigating sexual assault allegations against the playwright Israel Horovitz; has written about the politics of lip gloss, and recently followed three 13-year-old girls over the course of their eighth grade year.
As an editor, Jessica helped steer The Times’ coverage of #MeToo, launched and oversaw the Overlooked Obituaries project for women who’d not been deemed significant enough for them in the past, and was the editor of "This is 18," an immersive look at the lives of eighteen-year-old girls around the world today, which was exhibited at Photoville and has since become a bestselling book. She partnered with Modern Love to depict the enduring gray area of sexual consent on college campuses, and was editor of The Primal Scream, which documented the plight of working moms in the pandemic — in words, pictures and sound.
Jessica began her career at Newsweek, where she wrote on subjects from teen bullying to LGBTQ rights, for which she received a GLAAD award. She embedded with a group of modern-day survivalists, profiled a polyamory enclave in her hometown, and chronicled the fight for marijuana legalization in California. With two colleagues, she documented the story of 46 women who sued Newsweek for gender discrimination in 1970, which became a book, and later a TV series called Good Girls Revolt.
Jessica speaks on journalism and women’s issues around the world, and her work has been honored by the Newswomen’s Club, the NY Press Club and the International Center for Photography, among other organizations. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU, where she teaches “Reporting the Zeitgeist,” and likes to shock her students by telling them she once worked for Tumblr. You can find her on Substack, co-hosting her podcast, “In Retrospect,” or bumming around Brooklyn (and sometimes Yucca Valley) with her spouse and dog. She grew up in Seattle.
Want to skip all that? Some Facts About Me:
I have an honorary degree from the nation’s first pot university
I won a GLAAD award for my coverage of the fight for marriage equality
I was the first and last and only gender editor of the New York Times
I have gone truly viral exactly once, for the #PussyGrabsBack meme
I once watched Hillary Clinton debate Donald Trump with her four best childhood friends
I created a primal scream hotline for working moms
I cohost a podcast called In Retrospect, which revisits tabloid moments from the 80s and 90s
I once found myself in Pamela Anderson’s attic
I used to curate a feminist stock photo collection with Getty Images
My first journalism job was as a reporter on the overnight crime beat at The Boston Globe
For a while, my photo was what showed up in the Wikipedia entry for “resting bitch face”
Speaking Agent
Wes Neff | Leigh Bureau
Literary Agent
Claudia Ballard | WME
Other Inquiries:
hi(at)jessicabennett(dot)com