Sacha Pfeiffer

Jun 15, 2026

NPR Investigations Correspondent · Spotlight Team Alumna

Washington, DC, USA

NPR (Investigations Correspondent)

Boston Globe (Spotlight Team, 2001–08)WBUR (2008–2014)

Pulitzer Prize 2003

Biography

Sacha Pfeiffer (born September 7, 1971, Columbus, Ohio) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and radio host, currently a correspondent on NPR's Investigations team. She is known for her work on the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team — whose 2001–2002 investigation of Catholic clergy sexual abuse won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service — and was portrayed by Rachel McAdams in the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight (2015). Pfeiffer joined NPR as an investigations correspondent in November 2018.

She is a graduate of Boston University with both a bachelor's and a master's degree. She started her career at the Dedham Times in Massachusetts before joining the Globe in 1995, where she covered courts, the legal industry, and nonprofits, and produced investigative series on financial abuses by private foundations, shoddy home construction, and sexual misconduct in the modeling industry. She left the Globe in 2008 for WBUR in Boston, where she was a senior reporter and host of All Things Considered and Radio Boston, winning a national Edward R. Murrow Award for broadcast reporting and guest-hosting On Point and Here & Now. She returned briefly to the Globe in 2014 before joining NPR in 2018. Her father Richard Pfeiffer was a former Ohio state senator.

At NPR, Pfeiffer covers accountability and investigative stories and occasionally guest-hosts national programs. She co-created the multi-episode podcast Gladiator, about the life and death of NFL player Aaron Hernandez. She is co-author (with her Spotlight colleagues) of Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. She volunteers as an ESL teacher.