Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding[1][2] and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012,[2][3] at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units.

[5] Stokes was spied on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her husband and son attempted to flee the United States and defect to Cuba.

[15] The archives grew to about 71,000 (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media)[16][15] VHS and Betamax tapes (up to eight hours each) stacked in her home and apartments she rented just to store them.

Her son, Michael Metelits, told WNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to [the] task [of creating an archive].

[17] Some of Stokes's tape collection consisted of 24/7 coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separate VCRs in her house.

Also included are a 1984 JVC VHS deck set recording regular programs from Boston in a six-hour Extended Play format.

[18] Stokes's final recording took place on December 14, 2012, as she was dying; it captured coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre.

[21] Stokes bequeathed the entire tape collection to her son Michael Metelits, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice.

[23][24][3] A documentary about her life, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,[25] was directed by Matt Wolf[26] and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival.

[27][6][28] A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than seven hundred hours of Marion's tapes, titled Input, was published in Fall of 2023.