[Phoebe Eaton | American journalist and author]
“A TALENTED WRITER”
PHOEBE EATON is a multi-award-winning American journalist, playwright, and screenwriter. For the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, et al., she has covered business, crime, politics and style. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has publicly deemed her 'a talented writer' in New York Magazine.
A reporter working internationally and author of the nonfiction book IN THE THRALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, with the subtitle: THE SECRET HISTORY OF EL CHAPO, THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS NARCO, Eaton has had a unique crash course in how myriad worlds work, in all the ways people get broken. Her stories in such publications as the New York Observer, Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Vogue, GQ (UK), Air Mail, The Daily Beast, the Guardian and the Saturday Telegraph and Observer magazines, et cetera and so, on are cited in umpteen Wikipedia articles and by a thousand-plus books, academic journals, and studies according to Google Scholar and linked HERE.
Her substack HERE BE DRAGONS was a 2025 finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club’s Best Journalistic Use of Social Media Award thanks to her ancillary photojournalism.
Phoebe Eaton has appeared on Fox’s Good Day New York, Dateline NBC, Entertainment Tonight, Court TV/truTV’s Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice, NY1, the Recount Network’s News Items with John Ellis podcast, Fox Nation’s The Killer Interview with Piers Morgan, et al. Her long-form pieces have been translated into several languages, and she is cited as an expert on the subject of the Sinaloa cartel in such Mexican publications as Sinaloa’s Riodoce magazine and Sinaloa’s major-circulation daily newspaper El Debate.
Journalist.
JOURNALISM AWARDS & HONORS:
In 2025, Phoebe Eaton was a Los Angeles Press Club finalist for the David Robb Civil Justice Award for Best Investigative Civil Justice Story of the year across all platforms, incorporating surprising exclusive reporting during the Harvey Weinstein retrial going quite beyond what was presented in court. Eaton received a 2021 National Journalism Award/medal (Premio Nacional de Periodismo) from the Press Club of Mexico for her reporting on the Sinaloa Cartel and the Brooklyn trial of its effective co-Consul Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán {HERE at 1:46:39). She has also been a winner of the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award for Investigative Reporting 2020 across all media; five National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards from 2020-2025 in the categories of Investigative Reporting and Hard (and Soft) News); and was designated a 2021 Deadline Club Award finalist for her three-part THE MAKING OF A PREDATOR series in Graydon Carter’s Air Mail weekly [download entire series PDF HERE] featuring exclusive, strangely revealing interviews with Harvey and Bob Weinstein exposing the secret demons struggling for both their souls and the dysfunctional family dynamics that led them to this terrible place.
Investigating hardball prosecutorial tactics during Harvey Weinstein’s 2025 Manhattan retrial for The Hollywood Reporter in articles heralded by Matt Drudge’s The Drudge Report, she was not only a finalist for L.A.’s prestigious David Robb Civil Justice Award but also picked up a pair of National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards for Best Investigative Story (online) and Best Soft News (film) Story of the year (online). Her “Here Be Dragons” Substack review of ex-reality TV-show Donald Trump’s road show when it pulled into Madison Square Garden in October, 2024, “GOP Woodstock,” also garnered a finalist nomination for Best Journalistic Use of Social Media to Tell or Enhance a Story Award.
In 2017, Eaton won a New York Press Club Journalism Award for reporting in Guerrero state, Mexico, with the publication of CARTEL WATCH: PENITENTES, PEDOPHILES, POETS, MOVIE STARS, SILVERSMITHS, AND DRUG LORDS in The Daily Beast. This was the first (and to date, only) article to chart one town’s waxing and waning cartel presence as reflected in a religious spectacle dating from the 16th century and its long-held dirty secret of child sacrifices made to an American pederast who’d single-handedly revived the economy and introduced the place to Hollywood types—JFK honeymooning here.
[“This series was thorough, innovative, and informative. Covering powerful men like Harvey Weinstein is always tricky and difficult, but Phoebe Eaton hit it out of the park, doing a fantastic job not just covering the nitty-gritty of issues surrounding what has been a notorious case, but also getting these men to talk to her. This is what investigative journalism is made for — speaking truth to power.”]
— NEWSWOMEN’S CLUB OF NEW YORK FRONT PAGE AWARD 2020 CITATION
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Screenwriter.
Phoebe Eaton's theater and film work considers complex issues involving sex workers; the queer and transgender individual; the mentally ill; PTSD war veterans; immigrants; women; the Black experience; Muslim identity; crime; and the soullessness/hypocrisies of big business and government.
SCREENWRITING AWARDS & HONORS:
Eaton is also a finalist-winner of 2022’s TrackingB TV Script Award, a finalist in the 2023 Harvardwood Writers Competition (TV pilot), and shortlisted for 2021’s American Zoetrope studios Screenplay Award (TV pilot). A 2020-2021 Jeff Sagansky Harvardwood Television Writers Program selectee, she was a 2019 Writers Guild East MINY Writers Room finalist and a 2018 Imagine [Entertainment] Impact Content Accelerator finalist (top 1% of 4,000).
Eaton is a past winner of a Scriptapalooza TV Writing Prize (BREAKING BAD: "RESURRECTION"), drawing on sources in the FBI/DEA and rustling up her own meth cook-slash-explosives expert, known to his militia following as "Uncle Fester."
Playwright.
A member of the Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit, the Dramatists Guild, and a PEN Prison Writing Program mentor, Eaton has seen her work developed via the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive (Gary Garrison/Mark Bly/Marsha Norman) and a Tina Satter/Half Straddle Writing/Directing Workshop. Readings via the Dramatists Guild, Kennedy Center, Naked Angels, LAMA, Breakthrough Los Angeles, and Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit.
PLAYWRITING AWARDS & HONORS:
A 2017 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation playwright fellow, Eaton was a 2018-2019 ScreenCraft Stage Play Award finalist for her A FIELD GUIDE TO THE AMAZON, which is excerpted and included in Smith & Kraus’s BEST STAGE MONOLOGUES 2021 series. Another full-length, WOMAN DESCENDING A STAIRCASE (excerpted in Smith & Kraus’s BEST STAGE MONOLOGUES 2019 series and in Applause Books’ SHE PERSISTED: MONOLOGUES BY WOMEN 2021) was a 2017-18 Woodward-Newman Drama Award finalist-winner and also shortlisted for the 2019 Austin Film Festival Stage Play/Playwriting Award.
[Above: With playwright JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY in the ACTORS STUDIO PLAYWRIGHT/ DIRECTORS UNIT. Below: ZERO BOY and SAYRA PLAYER in WOMAN DESCENDING A STAIRCASE (PDU).] (IMAGES © PHOEBE EATON 2024)
[PHOEBE EATON interviewed El Chapo’s family in his Sinaloa hometown; CLICK PIC FOR LA TUNA PHOTO PORTFOLIO (IMAGE © PHOEBE EATON 2024)]
INSTAGRAM:
Books.
Phoebe Eaton has sat ringside at the trial of extradited Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán exclusively interviewing his family multiply in his hometown hideout La Tuna deep in the Sierra Madre mountains and in Sinaloa’s capital Culiacán as he stood in the dock back in New York City. Eaton is the author of the nonfiction Kindle Single “IN THE THRALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING: THE SECRET HISTORY OF EL CHAPO, THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS NARCO” excerpted in the New York Post on 2/3/19 with her own original rare photography; No. 1 “Organized Crime” Kindle Single its first week out and No. 7 Amazon Hot New Releases/Organized Crime. Her interviews are widely regarded as the longest and most personal ever granted by El Chapo’s mother, María Consuelo Loera Pérez, and his sisters Bernarda and Armida. (See official website HERE.)
BOOKS AWARDS & HONORS:
In December, 2021, she received for In the Thrall of the Mountain King the Premio Nacional de Periodismo—Mexico’s National Journalism Award—from the Press Club of Mexico.
[“Extraordinario trabajo.”]
— MEXICO’S NATIONAL JOURNALISM AWARD (PREMIO NACIONAL DE PERIODISMO) 2021 CITATION, FOR REPORTING IN SINALOA ON SINALOA-CARTEL BOSS JOAQUÍN ‘EL CHAPO’ GUZMÁN
Additional training.
Eaton was a 2019 recipient of a Steven Sotloff Memorial 2Lives Foundation Global Journalist Security (GJS) HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS SCHOLARSHIP to support her news-gathering from Sinaloa state (gunfire/kidnapping reaction; basic weaponry; combat medic training; digital security). She has additional riots and civil-unrest training from Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and is HEFAT certified (Vice Media, 2022). Via multiple (2020/2021/2022) Women Photograph Workshops, she’s also had ACOS Alliance safety-module instruction. (Translation: she’s got some sense of what to do if she’s being tear-gassed, kidnapped, or shot at.)
Photojournalism.
Phoebe Eaton has photo-documented unusual goings-on all over the world to accompany her reported stories and support her TV and feature-film scripts. (See PHOTO PROJECTS in the Main Menu and/or CLICK HERE FOR PHOTO GALLERY.)
Back story.
Eaton’s career as a writer was launched as a United States-Japan Foundation Japan Society Media fellow in Tokyo, where she was charged with interviewing yakuza, police detectives, beat journalists, and academics, taking tea not only with members of the Sumiyoshi-kai crime syndicate but also the man cloning the woolly mammoth. Eaton has also traveled the South of France with high-end call girls. Walked the tequila-bottle-scattered cemeteries of Juárez/Culiacán and also: Cairo’s most tumultuous traffic island, Tahrir Square. Her magazine stories are fables of power and its attainment, her subjects as varied as studio heads Harvey and Bob Weinstein (interviewed multiply, pre- and post-scandal; parts I, II and III linked here), Anthony Weiner, Katie Couric, Ivana and Ivanka Trump (interviewed Donald, too), Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Mick Jagger’s suicided girlfriend L’Wren Scott, Sony’s Tommy Mottola, Nicole Richie, Gwen Stefani, mafia defense attorney Gerry Shargel, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, shock fashion photographer Terry Richardson, et al.
Crime writer T.J. English (The Westies, Havana Nocturne) has described Eaton’s reported Substack essay on alleged United Healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione “a brilliant piece of journalism, a great piece of work”—calling author Phoebe Eaton “an exemplary writer.”
FROM “THE PERKS OF BEING HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S PUBLICIST” BY JACOB BERNSTEIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES (2025):
[“The Hollywood Reporter had published an article about [witness for the prosecution] Kaja Sokola with the headline 'Anonymous No More: Inside the Complicated Life of Harvey Weinstein’s Key Accuser.’
Mr. Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, spotted the writer, PHOEBE EATON, in the courtroom and approached to provide Mr. Weinstein’s take on it: ‘He said it was fantastic.’
‘I’m not out to please him,’ she said.
‘OK, I’ll just ignore you in the courtroom,’ Mr. Engelmayer said, before heading out to the hallway and toward the elevator.]
Media appearances.
Eaton has appeared on Fox’s Good Day New York, Dateline NBC, Entertainment Tonight, Court TV/truTV’s Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice, NY1, The Recount network’s News Items with John Ellis podcast. Fox Nation’s The Killer Interview with Piers Morgan, et al.
Eaton has traveled extensively (Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Israel/the West Bank, pre-détente Cuba, Argentina, Morocco, Dubai, Russia, India, Nepal, Thailand, Hungary, Tokyo, Kobe, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Kenya, Sicily, Malta, Mexico, et al.). She has experience reporting everywhere from Indian reservations on Native American issues (a branch of the family is Northern Cheyenne) to the Middle and Far East, Africa, and Mexico (Guerrero state/Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Guadalajara, Sinaloa, and Mexico City, where her family lived).
Phoebe Eaton grew up in New York and in the Republic of Ireland but has lived, too, in Japan (Tokyo) and coastal (Muslim) Kenya in addition to London, Rome, Paris, and Istanbul.
Affiliations.
Phoebe Eaton is a member of PEN. Also: Women in Film. Society of Business Editors and Writers. Association of Foreign Press Correspondents. Foreign Press Association. Frontline Freelance Register. National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Education.
University of Chicago (additional degree work at Harvard University and Columbia University), B.A. English Literature.
As seen on:
[“Daniel Pelosi gave sworn testimony already not containing any of these new details, also affirming he’s a provable pathological liar. I honestly think he'd say anything. And now has."]
— Phoebe Eaton, THE KILLER INTERVIEW WITH PIERS MORGAN
[EL TROPICANA, HAVANA. CLICK PIC FOR CUBA NOCHE PHOTO PORTFOLIO. RIGHT: HAVANA RATION-BOOK GROCERY STORE. CLICK PIC FOR CUBA DÍA PHOTO PORTFOLIO. (IMAGES © PHOEBE EATON 2024)]
