AWARD-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST & DOCUMENTARIAN

Tamara started her career as a newspaper crime reporter and wrote long-format, investigative pieces. She believes in the transportive power of storytelling and earned a reputation early on as a tenacious reporter willing to go to great lengths to get a story.

She has been locked up in a New York jail, worked on a chain gang, chased drug smugglers through a sewage tunnel underneath Mexico, jumped out of a plane, dug graves for the indigent, been shot with a taser, worked on a Nascar pit crew, confronted a drug smuggler in a cave, and spent the night in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Tent City - which has since been shut down for inhumane conditions.

She has interviewed Presidents, murderers, cartel leaders, gun runners, human smugglers, and gang members, among others.

Since her 2001 appearance on the hit reality show “Survivor,” which was watched by 20 million viewers, Tamara Leitner has been in the public eye. As an investigative journalist in Phoenix, NYC, and Chicago, she’s been a fixture on televisions in homes across America for decades.

And while reporting as a national network correspondent on the Today Show, Nightly News, and MSNBC, millions of viewers have watched Tamara daily as she traveled the globe covering natural disasters and reporting on human rights injustices from Syria to Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia and right here in the states.

Tamara has won a dozen Emmys for her investigative reporting. And was awarded a Peabody, an Edward R. Murrow, and a Sigma Delta Chi Award for her documentary Toxic Secrets. She also received a GLAAD media award for an investigation on transgender murders.

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Tamara has appeared on the following shows:

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Watch: Toxic Secrets Documentary
Watch: Toxic Secrets Documentary

Toxic Secrets

In the Peabody and Emmy-award winning investigative documentary 'Toxic Secrets,' a handful of brave vets share their stories of being forced to secretly bury Agent Orange on a U.S. military base in South Korea.

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