A learned enthusiast
Born in 1976, Patrick Radden Keefe grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Boston. His mother is a professor of philosophy at the university, his father works for a time in politics (on the Democratic side) before embarking on the hotel business, but Keefe knows very young that he wants to write. After writing (writing) some short stories “very bad”, he decides for journalism. Inspired by the great feathers of the New Yorker, Janet Malcolm or David Grann, he dreams of joining the weekly. After studying economics and law at Columbia, Yale and Cambridge, England, he entered the New Yorker in 2006, before being hired in 2012.
A moral journalist
“I take moral issues very seriously,” says this reporter who made a name for himself in 2006 with a book on the world of intelligence (Chatter, not translated). This is followed by an investigation into a Chinese woman convicted of bringing thousands of illegal immigrants into the United States (The Snakehead, 2009), then a book on the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (Do not say anything, Belfond, 2020). In 2021 appears Empire of Pain (The Empire of Pain, Belfond), his investigation of the Sackler family. Owner of Purdue Pharma, the laboratory behind the painkiller OxyContin, this dynasty of billionaire philanthropists with aggressive and deceitful methods is held responsible for the opioid epidemic which has claimed the lives of half a million Americans. As often, the book was born from an article written for the New Yorker. “After the publication in the magazine, I received hundreds of letters, from families of victims but also from relatives of the Sacklers. The family refused to speak to me. So I needed sources to bring the reader closer to their daily lives and their personalities. »
A vigilante in spite of himself
In June 2021, Patrick Radden Keefe was asked to testify before the US Congress, which was investigating the role of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma in the opioid crisis. A few months later, the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, questioned ahead of the Met Gala, the fashion world’s great annual party, about the repeated requests by activists and artists to rename the Sackler wing of the venerable institution, confided having read the book and thinking about the question (it has been done since December 2021). “Of course, it is gratifying to know that the book is read and perceived as irrefutable, comments Radden Keefe, but I am not an activist and I do not want to measure the success of a work by its concrete effect. Most of the time, journalists don’t change the world and our work is no less valuable. »
You have 24.23% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.