Nina Haskell

Nina Reines Haskell (Totenberg) is an American legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) focusing primarily on the activities and politics of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her reports air regularly on NPR's news magazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. From 1992 to 2013, she was also a panelist on the syndicated TV political commentary show Inside Washington.

She's considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, and the late Cokie Roberts. Newsweek magazine called her the creme de la creme of NPR, and Vanity Fair refers to her as "Queen of the Leaks". She has won many broadcast journalism awards for both her explanatory pieces and her scoops.

Among her scoops was her groundbreaking report of sexual harassment allegations made against Clarence Thomas by University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, leading the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Previously, in 1986, she broke the story that Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg had smoked marijuana, leading Ginsburg to withdraw his name. In 1977, she reported on secret Supreme Court deliberations relating to the Watergate scandal.

Totenberg was born in Manhattan, New York City, the eldest daughter of Melanie Francis (Eisenberg), a real estate broker, and violinist Roman Totenberg. Her father was a Polish Jewish immigrant, who lost many of his family members in the Holocaust. Her mother was of German Jewish and Polish Jewish descent, from an upper-class family that had lived in San Francisco and New York City.

Totenberg is the widow of U.S. Senator Floyd Haskell (D-Colorado), who she married in 1979. In 2000, she married H. David Reines, a trauma surgeon and vice chairman of surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia; U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the wedding. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)

• Wikipedia: Nina Totenberg