Bios

Ravi Somaiya has been a journalist for more than 20 years, and has learned from some of the very best that have ever done it. He has written for every publication he can think of, and was a staff writer at Gawker, a crime reporter, international correspondent, breaking news writer and media correspondent for the New York Times, produced and presented short documentaries for Vice on HBO and edited and mentored at Columbia Journalism School.

He covered the Boston marathon bombing, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, the London riots, the mass killing in Norway, the Arab spring, the hubris of the tech industry, the collapse of the media industry, killer bears and the strangest exorcism imaginable. He's done investigative work, and broken stories, on Islamic extremist terrorism, disinformation, Wikileaks, the British phone hacking scandal and many others. He also wrote a book about the mysterious death of the second UN Secretary General in the Congo in 1961. He has three projects in development for film and TV, with Charlevoix Entertainment, Prologue/Blumhouse and Plimsoll Productions.

An associate of Donald Trump once (indirectly) threatened to expose that he had not attended a conference he said he was attending. Julian Assange called him "a sleazy hack job". The right felt his book was racist because it was not positive about the role of colonialism in Africa. The left felt his book was racist because he is the wrong colour to write about Africa in the first place. Nicer (and probably more attractive) people compared him to John LeCarre or Robert Ludlum. His proudest moment was his name appearing for three seconds in an episode of Nathan For You.

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Lachlan Cartwright has reported from Australia, London and across the United States over a 20 year career in journalism. He has written for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, The Ankler and The Hollywood Reporter. He was appointed the first online news editor of The Sun at 25 and went on to create and helm the media newsletter Confider.

He has broken agenda setting stories about the Murdochs, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and child sex abuse at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. He also covered Michael Jackson’s death, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the NYC bike path terror attack. In 2016 he broke a series of stories that were under restrictive “super injunctions” in the UK, which led London law firms to advise clients against the practice. He has also appeared on television and radio across the world.

He wrote the cover story for the New York Times magazine about the role he played in Donald Trump’s “catch and kill” hush money scandal while he was Executive Editor of the National Enquirer and Radar Online. (In the course of that work he was threatened with two multimillion dollar lawsuits). His proudest moment is appearing in a towel in People magazine after a photo editor at the New York Post accidentally released unpublished pictures of him and a colleague inside the Standard hotel while covering a story about guests having sex in the windows. He also once had to eat cheese made from breast milk. 

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