The scandal around USA Gymnastics and former Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar is shining a spotlight on the sexual abuse of young athletes. This week, Reveal revisits the story of a woman who decides to confront the coach she says abused her decades earlier.

Reporter Tennessee Watson was abused by her gymnastics coach when she was a kid in the 1980s. Over 25 years later, when she learned he still was coaching children, she called the police. Her inside account of the arduous process of seeking justice in her own case exposes discrepancies in prosecutors’ responses to reports of child sexual abuse and highlights a lack of accountability.

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Wildfires raged across Northern California in October, burning through the state’s famed Napa and Sonoma wine regions. In all, more than 170 blazes ripped across an area the size of Maryland and Delaware combined. Scores awoke to flames at their doors, and 44 people were killed in the deadliest fire event in state history.

On this episode of Reveal, we team up with KQED to examine what led to delays in evacuations and why so many fire victims received no warnings at all. As wildfires grow more intense, are first responders keeping up?

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Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.

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Federal law requires colleges and universities to track and disclose sexual assaults on campus. It’s different for kindergarten through 12th grade, where there are no similar requirements for cases involving assaults between students. In elementary, middle and high schools across the U.S., the Associated Press found a shocking level of sexual violence among students. The AP also uncovered a new dimension to the problem – on U.S. military bases.  

On this episode of Reveal, we delve into results from the AP’s continuing investigation.

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Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.

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And to see some of what you’re hearing, we’re also on Instagram @revealnews.

Across the country, criminals are arming themselves in unexpected ways. In Florida, they’re stealing guns from unlocked cars and gun stores. In other places, they’re getting them from the police themselves, as cash-strapped departments sell their used weapons to buy new ones. On this episode of Reveal, we learn where criminals get their guns and what cars can teach us about gun safety.

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Across the country, universities are being criticized over issues of money: from how they spend their endowments, to how they raise tuition, to how they award financial aid. Many students are feeling the pinch. They’re going into debt to pay for their education, or abandoning their dreams of a college degree altogether. This week on Reveal, we take a look at the bottom line for universities and students. This episode was originally broadcast on Dec. 9, 2017.

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Some police departments are embracing a set of tactics designed to reduce the use of force – and prevent police shootings. Rather than rushing in aggressively, officers back off, wait out people in crisis and use words instead of weapons.

But this training isn't required in most states. Reveal teams up with APM Reports and finds that most cops spend a lot more time training to shoot their guns than learning how to avoid firing them.

This episode was originally broadcast on May 6, 2017.

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This episode was originally broadcast July 1, 2017.

Picture an American farmer. Chances are, the farmer you’re imagining is white – more than 9 out of 10 American farmers today are. But historically, African Americans played a huge role in agriculture. The nation’s economy was built largely on black farm labor: in bondage for hundreds of years, followed by a century of sharecropping and tenant farming.

In the early 1900s, African American families owned one-seventh of the nation’s farmland, 15 million acres. A hundred years later, black farmers own only one-quarter of the land they once held and now make up less than 1 percent of American farm families.

The federal government has admitted it was part of the problem. In 1997, a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture said discrimination by the agency was a factor in the decline of black farms. A landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of black farmers, Pigford v. Glickman, was settled in 1999, and the government paid out more than $2 billion as a result. But advocates for black farmers say problems persist.

On this episode of Reveal, reporter John Biewen of “Scene on Radio” tells the story of a black farmer who says the USDA treated him unfairly because of his race.

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Old paint, old pipes and demolition dust often are sources of toxic lead. It’s a poison known to cause neurological damage in children. For adults, new science shows lead exposure increases the risk of heart disease. Reveal investigates the lurking threat from the dust of urban demolitions to the wilds of Wyoming. This episode was originally broadcast March 31, 2018.

In Detroit, dust is a particular concern. Because of the population drop, the city is tearing down tens of thousands of empty homes. Contractors are supposed to follow strict protocols on  demolitions, but when those rules are not enforced, lead dust can drift around the neighborhood, poisoning children in unsuspecting families. Reporter Eilís O'Neill explores the impact.

Next, we go to the Fruitvale neighborhood in Oakland, California, where the rate of kids with high lead levels in their blood was greater than in Flint, Michigan, during the height of the water crisis there. Reporters Angela Johnston and Marissa Ortega-Welch of KALW in San Francisco explain how high housing costs and lead exposure are connected and introduce us to public health nurse Diep Tran, who says lead poisoning puts enormous stress on families.

“I've seen parents go into shock,” Tran says. “Most of them are anxious. Some feel guilty and go into denial, which is not good for the child, because parents in denial don't want to work with us. How can the child recover if we don't help the family?”

She says her only option sometimes is to advise families to move to a homeless shelter to escape exposure to lead.

Paul Flory could not escape. He grew up in Idaho’s Silver Valley, a longtime mining area that’s now a lead-laced Superfund site. Host Al Letson talks with him about going to school next door to a smelter and the struggles he’s had after his childhood lead poisoning was recorded – and then largely ignored.

Finally, we discover how tiny fragments of lead bullets hurt hunters’ unintended targets: eagles, condors and other scavenging wildlife. We trace lead dust from game guts to eagle brains in Wyoming.

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In December 1944, Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with a secret counterattack through the Ardennes forest, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. In the carnage that followed, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.

After desperate house-to-house fighting between German and American forces, American soldiers wrested control of the Belgian town of Chenogne. Americans rounded up the remaining German prisoners of war, took them to a field and machine-gunned them.

Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway found an entry in General George S. Patton’s handwritten diary referring to the incident in Chenogne. Patton called it murder. So why then was there no official investigation?

Through vivid interviews with a 93-year-old veteran who witnessed the event, conversations with historians and the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials, and analysis of formerly confidential military records, we investigate why justice never came for the American soldiers responsible for the massacre at Chenogne.

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Deep in the backroads of central Florida, hidden between trees dripping with Spanish moss, sits the campus of an infamous center for the developmentally disabled. Its story shows what can happen when families have nowhere else to find care for their loved ones.

After years of complaints, Carlton Palms is finally being shut down. But its parent company, Bellwether Behavioral Health, is still running group homes across the country, where new allegations have arisen.

WNYC reporter Audrey Quinn investigates the company and speaks to a family whose son was abused at two of Bellwether’s New Jersey facilities. She discovers that, with national spending on autism services expected to increase 70 percent by 2025, the company is owned by a private equity firm.

Then, reporter Elly Yu investigates the death of a DACA recipient while at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Georgia.

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In Texas, the foster care system is failing the vulnerable children it’s meant to protect, leaving many without a safe place to live. Foster children often end up on the streets or in jail, which is one of the few places where they can receive treatment services. This week we look into the crisis in foster care, and efforts to fix it.

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African migrants fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity often end up in Libya, where they are tortured and trafficked. Many try to escape to Europe, only to be intercepted at sea and returned to Libya. On this episode of Reveal, we trace their journey and explore how Europe’s immigration policy is helping Libyan warlords and putting migrants at risk. This episode was originally broadcast on May 19, 2018.

In the first segment, reporter Raphaël Krafft takes us to the open waters off the coast of Libya, where a small boat carrying migrants is trying to flee the country. The boat is filled beyond capacity and starts to take on water and sink. A rescue ship run by nongovernmental organizations from Europe is poised to help, but a coast guard boat from Libya intervenes, creating a standoff at sea.

Next, we learn why so many migrants – mostly from Africa – end up trapped in Libya and about the conditions they face when they’re there. Krafft meets a young Nigerian man named Osaze Sunday, who was held for ransom and trafficked in Libya before attempting to escape by boat to Italy.

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*This show was originally broadcast February 3, 2018. *It’s been ten years since former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested for committing one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. For decades he ran a Ponzi scheme from a secret office in New York, duping thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Many of them lost everything when the house of cards fell.

How did Madoff pull it off? And what steps have regulators taken in the past decade to ensure that it doesn’t happen again? For this week’s episode, we teamed up with Steve Fishman, a reporter based in New York City who’s followed the story for years. He produced and hosted a seven-part podcast for Audible called “Ponzi Supernova.”

Through interviews with financial experts, federal agents, Madoff’s cellmates and Madoff himself, Fishman explains how the $60 billion con worked, and why Madoff was able to elude regulators for decades. Fishman says that while Madoff was the mastermind of the scheme, it was banks and other financial institutions who “weaponized” him, turning him from a “local swindler” into an unstoppable force.

Madoff will spend the rest of his life in prison, but no one from these institutions faced similar consequences. And even though some precautions have been put in place since Madoff’s arrest, financial experts warn that for the most part, investors are still on their own.

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Desperate to have a child, a couple puts its trust in a fertility clinic that promises more than it can deliver. They enter a world where some clinics take unnecessary risks to make them look far more successful than they are in reality.

From reporter Jonathan Jones and Reveal’s Bernice Yeung and Emily Harris.

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We hike through the jungles of El Salvador to find an elusive fleet of shark-fishing boats implicated in overfishing and possible human trafficking. Then we join a UN mission to intercept a crewmember from one of those boats who might be a victim of human trafficking. Finally, we investigate a U.S.-based seafood company that purports to be a model of sustainability.

From reporters Sarah Blaskey, Ben Feibleman, Robin McDowell, Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza, producer Michael Montgomery, and editor Brett Myers. This show was originally broadcast June 30th, 2018.

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When police closed the rape case against Bryan Kind, they made it look like it had been solved. But he never was arrested – or even charged. We team up with Newsy and ProPublica to investigate how police across the country make it seem like they’re solving more rape cases than they actually are.

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He seemed to confess to the crime, twice to his ex-girlfriend, once to police. But prosecutors never charged him. The reasons why show how rape myths continue to influence how justice is meted out in America. Reported in partnership with Newsy and ProPublica.

The recent killing of 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue refocused the nation’s attention on right-wing extremist terrorists. Meanwhile, the Trump administration points to radical Islam as the bigger threat to security. On this episode of Reveal, we investigate which terror threats get tracked and which are ignored.

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In the carnage that followed the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.

**Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

In 1971, a 22-year-old journalist named Robert Rosenthal got a call from his boss at The New York Times. He told him to go to room 1111 of the Hilton Hotel, bring enough clothes for at least a month and not tell anyone.

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

Investigators dig up an unidentified murder victim, 45 years after she was buried, in an attempt to give her back her name. The exhumation leads to a series of unexpected revelations about who she was and why she may have been killed. Her case speaks to the complexity – and importance – of opening up cold cases.

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We examine the stories of two families separated in 2018 at the U.S.-Mexico border and how what happened to them matches up with what the government said was supposed to happen.

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It’s been 10 years since the great housing bust and lending is back for some Americans, but not for others. In dozens of cities across the country, lenders are more likely to deny loans to applicants of color than white ones.

On this episode of Reveal, we dig into the new redlining.

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A journey into the world of right-wing Twitter trolls, pro-Trump political operatives and fake-news profiteers from St. Louis to Macedonia, to answer one big question: How did America become a post-truth country?

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Reveal received a secret recording of oil industry executives rejoicing over the “unprecedented access” they have to David Bernhardt, the No. 2 official at the Interior Department. President Donald Trump has nominated Bernhardt to the top slot at the department, following the resignation of Ryan Zinke, and Bernhardt’s confirmation hearings are this week.

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Before there were boycotts, there was Captain Boycott. Meet the man who gave name to a new kind of protest.

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Some people who live along the Mississippi River are willing to do anything to keep their homes and farms safe from flooding – even if it means inundating their own neighbors. This week, we team up with ProPublica to investigate how rising waters have set off a race to build the highest levee.

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How a baggie of crack cocaine packed with fear, distortion and misconceptions, and one presidential address in the 1980s, helped shape the war on drugs.

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Myths of the Civil War and slavery are being kept alive at Confederate monuments, where visitors hear stories of “benevolent slave owners” and enslaved people “contented with their lot.”  Plus, an artist finds herself in the middle of the creation of New Mexico’s most controversial historical monument.

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Residential care homes seem like the perfect place for Mom or Grandpa to live out their golden years, but their home-like facades are hiding rampant wage theft and exploitation of caregivers. Reveal’s Jen Gollan takes us into her investigation of the care-home industry.

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A giant, mysterious illegal dump in Chicago was part of a federal investigation that brought down a dozen corrupt politicians, but it left neighborhood residents angry and feeling used.

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They belonged to an elite police task force charged with getting guns off Baltimore’s streets. Instead, the plainclothes cops roamed the city, robbing people on the street, breaking into homes to steal money and drugs, and planting evidence on their victims.

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How did one helicopter become the deadliest aircraft in the US military? To find out, Reveal partners with Investigative Studios, the production arm of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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President Donald Trump says he doubts humans have much of a role in climate change. His administration has downplayed the science of climate change and sought to silence scientists working for the federal government.*
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In Oregon, the concussion protocols that were supposed to keep high school athletes safe end up falling short for a star quarterback. 

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The herbicide dicamba is causing a civil war in farm country. Plus, honeybee rustling in California’s almond groves. Lastly, sulfur and its link to asthma in children.

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“It is wrong to boycott Israel” is a bipartisan message. But is banning the boycott a violation of First Amendment rights? Also, the story of a man who is trying to boycott Israel while living under Israeli occupation. And the story of Captain Boycott, who gave his name to a new kind of protest.

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How a baggie of crack cocaine packed with fear, distortion and misconceptions, and one presidential address in the 1980s, helped shape the war on drugs.

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

Genetic genealogy is a powerful crime-solving tool that combines DNA science with family tree research. Where will it take us – a crime-free world or a dark dystopia?

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In 1996, Eddie Wise, the son of a sharecropper, purchased a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him. Reveal investigates his claim that he was discriminated against because of his race.

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As the House of Representatives continues its impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, we go back in time to the Nixon administration, when the threat of impeachment and a presidential pardon changed the course of history. We then examine the pardons system and learn why it has stopped functioning as originally intended.

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A Taser is supposed to help police resolve a situation without using their guns. But in police departments across America, Tasers aren’t always living up to their promise, sometimes with lethal results. 

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A high number of high school sports concussions. A low number of arrests for sexual assault. Reveal’s Reporting Network digs in.

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This episode was originally broadcast July 28, 2018.

In December 1944, Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with a secret counterattack through the Ardennes forest, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. In the carnage that followed, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

This episode was originally broadcast in May 2016. Back in 1971, a 22-year-old journalist named Robert Rosenthal got a call from his boss at The New York Times. He told him to go to Room 1111 of the Hilton Hotel, bring enough clothes for at least a month and not tell anyone. 

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

This episode originally was broadcast Oct. 5, 2019.

Genetic genealogy is a powerful crime-solving tool that combines DNA science with family tree research. Where will it take us – a crime-free world or a dark dystopia?

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

Advisory panels slashed, environmental regulations rolled back – how the Trump administration uses questionable science to justify its policies.

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Reveal is launching its first serialized investigation: American Rehab. In the midst of the worst opioid crisis in America’s history, Reveal uncovers a type of rehab that is flourishing by turning tens of thousands of people desperate for treatment into an unpaid workforce. The eight-episode series will run in Reveal’s podcast feed from March 28 to May 2, 2020.

As the pandemic sends more people online looking for entertainment, we look at how Facebook and other companies gather information about their users and turn it into profits. 

This episode originally was broadcast Aug. 3, 2019.

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The coronavirus pandemic has lead to major changes for homes and businesses, including more frequent use of chemicals and disinfectants. While they do help, some can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Professor John Meeker , senior associate dean for research at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, spoke with WEMU's David Fair about how best to safely use these products on "Issues of the Environment."