Peter Landesman

Peter Landesman (born 3 January 1965) is an American screenwriter, film director, producer, journalist, novelist and painter. He wrote a number of cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and others, including investigations into global arms trafficking, sex trafficking, refugee trafficking, the Rwandan genocide, and the creation and smuggling of forged and stolen art and antiquities. He also reported from the conflicts in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Pakistan and Afghanistan post-9/11. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed the biographical films Parkland (2013), Concussion (2015) and Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (2017). Career Landesman wrote his first fiction book The Raven, which was published in 1995, for which he won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Landesman's article The Girls Next Door about sex slaves and the trafficking of young and often underage girls into and through the United States, was featured as the cover story in the January 24, 2004 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Daniel Radosh had a public dispute with Landesman, when Radosh challenged the facts of the article. A series of articles about the dispute by Jack Shafer in the magazine Slate turned the issue of the article's accuracy into one of the most controversial topics in journalism during the first half of 2004. The details of the expose were challenged. That piece triggered a national conversation on sex trafficking in this country, and, notwithstanding the controversy over Landesman's accuracy, won Landesman his second Overseas Press Club Award, this one for Best Human Rights Reporting. The article was adapted into a film, Trade, which deals with human trafficking out of Mexico and a brother's attempt to rescue his kidnapped young sister. The film was released in 2007.