Cynthia McFadden

For the past 17 years, Cynthia McFadden has travelled the world reporting for ABC News. Her distinguished work has won many of broadcasting's most coveted awards... Read More »

For the past 17 years, Cynthia McFadden has travelled the world reporting for ABC News. Her distinguished work has won many of broadcasting's most coveted awards including the Emmy, the Peabody, the Dupont and the Foreign Press Award. For the past six years she has been the co-anchor of the celebrated news broadcast, Nightline.

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McFadden has focused much of her investigative work on human rights abuses, particularly those faced by women and children. She filed ground-breaking reports on the international trafficking of children in India and women from the former Soviet Union. She has also explored abuses in the mental health system in Mexico, and the U.S. and provided the first in-depth network report on grandparents raising their grandchildren in extreme poverty. She also led the first network investigation into one of America's darkest secrets, the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 100,000 American citizens during World War II. She has tackled a variety of social issues in her investigative work from girl gangs in Los Angeles to Medicaid fraud in Miami.

A graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, McFadden is also known for her incisive reporting on a wide range of legal topics. She has covered hundred of court cases ranging from the O.J. Simpson trial to the Bosnian War Crimes proceedings. She was the legal editor and narrator of the ground-breaking series "Inside the Jury Room" which made television history as the first to broadcast jury deliberations in a death penalty case. McFadden's hour-long documentary "Judgment at Midnight" won critical acclaim for its intimate and compelling look at the lives that intersected on Louisiana's death row, as did her reporting on the 40th anniversary of Brown vs. School Board.

She has interviewed a variety of world leaders including the presidents of the United States, Pakistan, Rwanda and Chile. Her interview with President George W. Bush was the only network interview the President gave on his faith. She filed six extended interviews with Senator Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign of 2008 and has subsequently travelled with her once she became Secretary of State. In Australia last year, McFadden conducted an exclusive joint interview with Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

McFadden's powerful investigation of the allegations that the Pacific Gas and Electric Company was polluting the ground water in two small California towns led to a historic $333 million dollar settlement. The case subsequently became the Academy Award-winning film "Erin Brockovich."

She has reported from a wide variety of hot spots around the world including Haiti, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, El Salvador, Rwanda, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Russia and China.

McFadden has also profiled a wide variety of entertainers from Madonna, Cher, Beyonce and Bono to Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie and George Clooney.

Before beginning her career at ABC, McFadden was an anchor and senior producer at Court TV.

From 1984 until 1991 she was the executive producer of Fred Friendly's Media and Society which produced thirty primetime programs for PBS including series on ethics, terrorism, the military and the news media, health care and the Presidency.

A native of Maine, McFadden graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Bowdoin College. She received her law degree in 1984 from Columbia University.